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RELIGION and SCIENCE 

AS 

ALLIES 



SIMILARITIES OF PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
KNOWLEDGE 

JUL 131889 0i j / 

, t0 n. 



JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY 



CHICAGO 
CHAKLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
. 175 Deabbobn Street 






Copyright, 1889, by 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 



jo 

L 



" Science was Faith once ; Faith were Science now 
Would she but lay her bow and arrow by, 
And arm her with the weapons of the time." 

" In vain would the skeptic make a distinction between science 
and common life, or between one science and auother. The argu- 
ments employed in all, if just, are of a similar nature and contain the 
same force and evidence. Or, if there be any difference among them, 
the advantage lies entirely on the side of theology and natural re- 
ligion." — Cleanthes, in Hume's " Dialogues," Part L 



COl^TE^TS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

PAGE 

The Present Antagonism of Science and ReHgion. — Hurtfulness 
of it. — Need of a Reconciliation between them. — Proposed 
Method of effecting this, which constitutes the Object of 
this Book 7 



CHAPTER I. 

What is Science ? — What is Religion ? — No Necessary and Right- 
ful Antagonism between them, when fully understood . 16 

CHAPTER II. 

Causes of the Actual Antagonism of the Scientific and the Re- 
ligious Worlds. — Ignorance of themselves. — Ignorance of 
each other. — Science confounded with Metaphysics and Va- 
rious Speculations. — Religion confounded with Ecclesiasti- 
cal Organizations and Theological Systems . . .25 

CHAPTER III. 

The Claim of Religion to possess Exclusive Information, and, 
consequently, a Rightful Sovereignty of Knowledge. — Hu- 
man Conditions and Fallible Character of Religion. — Divine 
Origin of Science. — Help and Correction received by Re- 

from Science 44 



Q CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

PAG* 

The Claims of Science to possess Exclusive Information and 
Rightful Sovereignty of the Realm of Knowledge. — The 
Faiths of Science. — Grounds and Methods.— Scientific Em- 
ployment of Intuition, Testimony, Authority, Analogy, and 
Hypothesis, and Frequent Lack of Verification . . .66 

CHAPTER V. 

Supposed Differences between Science and Religion in their Aims 
and Objects. — Faith of Science in the Supersensual, in the 
Immaterial, in the Inconceivable, and m the Infinite . . 116 



CHAPTER VI. 

Supposed Difference between Science and Religion in their Re- 
sults. — Uncertainty, Inexactness, and Variability, attach to 
Scientific as well as to Theological Results . . . 164 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Scientific Basis of Religion. — Inductive Proof of the Two 
Essentials of Theism, the Existence of the Soul and of 
God. — Observation of Facts, Classification, Inductions, and 
Verification 186 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Conclusion. — Science and Religion as FellowvLaborers in the 

Divine Service 220 



PHYSICAL Al^D RELIGIOUS 
KNOWLEDGE. 



INTKODUCTION. 

The conflict now going on between the physical 
discoveries and theories of these latter days, and the 
forms of faith which have hitherto ruled the mind 
of Christendom, is one of the most noticeable phe- 
nomena of the intellectual movement of the times. 
The constant discussions from pulpit and platform, 
the numerous essays, pamphlets, and books, in which 
these two opponents are arrayed one against the 
other, and attack, defense, or effort at reconciliation 
made, allow no intelligent man or woman to remain 
unaware of the controversy. 

It is a fact, so notorious that we need specify no 
particular instances uor details, that, by a large part 
of the Church, modern science is looked upon as a 
godless and blind teacher, a sacrilegious intruder 
upon the domain of revealed truth, and that, among 
almost all denominations and phases of religious 
thought, there has been more or less suspicion, jeal- 



8 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ousy, and abuse of physical investigation. It is a 
fact almost equally patent that, on the part of sci- 
ence likewise, among many, at least, of its repre- 
sentatives, there is a similar hostility entertained 
toward religion, and that not only all ecclesiastical 
organizations, but all spiritual faith and principles, 
are looked upon as their natural foes. 

Now, this present antagonism of religion and 
science is a matter which may justly give concern, 
I believe, to all who have at heart the welfare of 
either. It is becoming quite plain to all clear- 
sighted observers that religion certainly cannot af- 
ford the continuance of any such quarrel. 

" The problem of our age," said Archdeacon 
Hare, in his life of Sterling, " is to reconcile faith 
with knowledge, philosophy with religion. The 
men of our age will not believe unless you prove 
to them that what they are called upon to believe 
does not contradict the laws of their minds, and 
that it rests upon a solid and unshaken foundation." 

In former conflicts, the struggle had been to 
preserve the Church from division, or the orthodox 
doctrine from aberrations or perversions. 

In the present controversy, the debate concerns 
the fundamental ideas of religion. Twenty-five 
years ago Dr. Newman said to a sectarian contro- 
versialist, "Let us discuss the prospects of Christi- 
anity itself, instead of the differences between An- 
glican and Catholic." To-day such a change of 
front is still more necessary. More than ever be- 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

fore it is the citadel of Christianity, rather than her 
outposts, that needs to be defended. The wise Chris- 
tian will turn his arms from these petty skirmishes 
about tapers and genuflexions, millinery of priests 
and wording of creeds, the sense of Hebrew numer- 
als and the supernatural efficacy of drops of water, 
to ward off the blows of a nearer enemy — an in- 
vader who is pushing his way already with uplifted 
battle-axe into the Holy of Holies. 

In former assaults upon religion, it was cynics, 
and worldlings, and doubters of every thing, who 
led the attack. Jest and jibe, scoif and sneer, were 
the favorite weapons of attack. Believers had only 
to stand firm in courage and patience on the unas- 
sailed foundations of their faith, and the strong cur- 
rents of man's instinctive yearnings would before 
long turn the tide of popular opinion the other way, 
and bring the Church safely through its peril. To- 
day, however, the objections presented against re- 
ligion are brought forward in no frivolous spirit, 
from no mere feverish mental excitability or love of 
innovation, but in the sincerity of an earnest loyalty 
to truth, out of a serious desire to get at the reality 
of things, through all illusions and at all risks. It 
is not ridicule, but reason, that leads the assault. 
The weapons are not the clown's bells and grinning 
mask, but the astionomer's spectroscope, the biolo- 
gist's flask. The scales in which Christianity would 
now be tested are not those of universal skepticism, 
but of cautious, critical weighing of historic evi- 



10 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

dence and scientific proof. This method, of course, 
is a slower one than that of the French encyclope- 
dists. Religion has not to fear that any such rapid 
and radical revolution can now occur in the belief of 
Christendom as was wrought in France in the last 
quarter of the eighteenth century. But it is a much 
more dangerous course to its adversary. The ground 
it gains it keeps. Like an Alpine glacier, its slow, 
gigantic plane grinds to powder the most flinty ob- 
structions, and never loses a foot of ground that it 
has once taken. For four hundred years Science has 
driven the Church from post to post. The sphericity 
or the flatness of the earth, the mobility or stationa- 
riness of the globe, the six days' creation, the six 
thousand years' age of the world and of man, the 
universal deluge — these all have been battle-fields 
where the scientist and the ecclesiastic have met in 
conflict, and in every engagement it has been the 
ecclesiastic that has been worsted, and the scientist 
that has been victorious. The result is, that science 
to-day holds such a position that the belief of the 
next century may be said to lie in its hands. The 
facts that its distinguished savans establish to-day, 
in six months will be read in every newspaper and 
magazine in the civilized world ; in ten years will 
be incorporated in our school-books, and planted in 
the forming minds of our children ; in thirty years 
will be the creed of every educated man; and, be- 
fore a century has passed, will be the universal be- 
lief of all classes. If Christianity cannot harmonize 



INTB OB UCTION. 1 1 

nerself with science, it is much to be feared that the 
fate of the Ptolemaic system of the universe will, at 
no very distant period, be hers ; at least, no one can 
doubt that the future of Religion would be vastly 
more sure and prosperous if she could make science 
an ally instead of a rival. 

Nor for science, either, is it a matter of indiffer- 
ence what its relation toward religion is. While 
science stands, or is believed to stand, in an atti- 
tude of hostility to religion, it carries an unnecessary 
burden, which impedes no little its progress. The 
antagonism, whether it be real or only supposed, 
weakens its power and circumscribes its sphere of 
influence. It diverts its attention from its proper 
work to uncalled-for polemics. It vitiates the im- 
partiality of judgment and equanimity of tempera- 
ment which are required of it. Moreover, it is only, 
I venture to say, when science can gain the inspira- 
tion of the religious spirit, and be led forward and 
upward by such a conviction as animated Kepler, 
that, in tracing out the laws of Nature, he was think- 
ing God's thoughts after him — it is only when pur- 
sued in this mood, I believe, that science can do its 
best work. 

To bring, then, these two poles of modern thought 
into harmonious relations with each other, is a work 
of prime importance. On it depend the integrity 
and coordination of those two factors of man's high- 
er existence — the aspirations of his soul and the per- 
ceptions of his intellect — for whose development all 



12 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

other things are but instrumentalities. It is one of 
those questions that cannot be discussed too much. 
It may be worn threadbare, but it cannot be shoved 
out of sight. The multitude of writings and publi- 
cations concerning it but show how profound and 
universal is the interest in it. It is because of this 
interest that I venture to contribute a few thoughts, 
designed, if possible, to clear up some of the compli- 
cations and remove some of the oppositions of the 
controversy. My purpose is not, I wish it to be 
understood, to smooth over any real difficulties, to 
bridge any natural hiatuses, or to accommodate or 
compromise any inherent antagonisms. Such work 
is always, I believe, useless, if not mischievous. Nor 
is it to do, what so many have essayed, to show de- 
tailed coincidences or particular correspondences be- 
tween the present results of science and the testi- 
mony of the Scriptures ; to demonstrate how the six 
days of creation answer to the epochs of modern 
geology ; to exhibit the agreement of ethnography 
with mankind's descent from a single couple; to 
illustrate by modern hygiene the wisdom of the Le- 
vitical regulations ; or to disclose, in expressions of 
Job, or David, or Isaiah, anticipations of modern 
discoveries. A flexile and ingenious interpreter, not 
over-scrupulous about twisting words and forcing 
facts, can always do this. As Prof. Huxley has 
said, " One never knows what exegetic ingenuity 
may make of the original Hebrew." In that grand 
storehouse of thought and imagination, that vener- 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

able encyclopaedia of all the poetry, science, history, 
and philosophy, in which the Jewish mind flowered 
under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, in that 
Bible whose original and proper name, we should al- 
ways remember, is, the Books (ra fitflXia), not the 
Book — in that grand storehouse it is always pos- 
sible to find plenty of parallels, more or less strong, 
for almost every conceivable notion. Each past 
generation has found there its favorite theories : in 
Tertullian's age, the materiality of the soul ; in Au- 
gustine's, the flatness of the earth ; in the time of 
the schoolmen, the Aristotelian philosophy : fifty 
years ago, the cataclysmal systems of geology, the 
Cuvierian distinction of species, the creation from 
the dust and primitive enlightenment of man by di- 
rect exertion of supernatural power ; to-day, it is but 
little more difficult to find in the same pages author- 
ity or allowance for the nebular hypothesis, the evo- 
lution theory, and the savage if not animal origin of 
civilized man ; 1 to-morrow, again, the same method 
of interpretation may show the coincidence of the 
Scriptures with whatever newer discovery Science 
may have made, or imagined that she has made. The 

1 The Rev. Mr. Mahin, for instance, in a communication to The 
Popular Science Monthly, p. 48*7, August, lS^S, says : " Even the 
modern doctrine of evolution — Darwinism, if you please — is as nearly 
taught in the first chapter of Genesis as in the revelations of modern 
science ; and spontaneous generation seems to appear on the very 
face of the statements of Moses as therein recorded. Read verses 
20 and 24 : ' And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly, 1 
etc. 'And God said, Let the earth bring forth,' etc." 



14 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

hunting up of such correspondences is of very little 
value for any permanent reconciliation between sci- 
ence and religion. As the Dean of Canterbury, Dr. 
Payne Smith, has well said, 1 " If the wisest geolo- 
gist of our days could show that there was an exact 
agreement between geology and the Bible, it would 
rather disprove than prove its truth. For, as geol- 
ogy is a growing science, it would prove the agree- 
ment of the Bible with that which is receiving daily 
additions, and is constantly undergoing modification, 
and ten years hence the two would be at hopeless 
variance." The closer the coincidence happens to 
be shown in this present hour, the sooner it is likely 
disagreement will be revealed by the advancement 
of science, and the present interpretation of the sa- 
cred text become obsolete and require revision. The 
continual varying of her interpretation, and shifting 
of her ground, to which Keligion is necessitated, when 
by this method it seeks reconciliation with physi- 
cal knowledge, inevitably throws discredit upon her. 
It makes Faith appear as a defendant, continually 
obliged to Science for permission to live ; as a satel- 
lite reflecting the varying phases of the scientific 
primary, rather than as an independent power — the 
central, self-subsistent Sun of Righteousness. 

My aim, then, contemplates none of these objects 
or methods. It is, instead, looking at religion and 
science in their broadest and most essential features, 

1 P. 175, " Modern Skepticism," Lectures of the Christian Evidence 
Society. 



INTR OB UCTION. \ 5 

to set forth the underlying unities of physical and 
religious knowledge ; the common foundations on 
which they really rest ; the similarities of methods, 
objects, and general results, which exist between 
them, and the actual identity of interests which 
binds them together, and which should be acknowl- 
edged in word, thought, and action. 



J fi PHYSICAL AND RELIGIO US KNO WLED OK 



CHAPTER I. 

NO NECESSARY ANTAGONISM BETWEEN SCIENCE AND 
RELIGION. 

Is there any necessary antagonism between Sci- 
ence and Religion ? 

This is the first and main question in determin- 
ing their relations. This is the question which all 
well-wishers of either ought carefully to examine. 
For myself, I find the most thorough search show- 
ing an entire absence of any essential incompatibil- 
ity. An apparent and de facto conflict exists, and 
has existed for centuries. But there is no required 
and rightful opposition. For if we look straight at 
them, endeavoring to distinguish them from the 
many other things that have borne their names and 
claimed their dignities, what are they ? What, in 
strictness, is science ? What, exactly, is religion ? 
There are no authoritative definitions of either. 
There is, probably, no unanimous agreement in 
either the scientific world or the religious world as 
to the signification of either term. Many and vari- 
ous definitions have been proposed. There are few 
that are not imperfect. After a careful considera- 



NO NECESSARY ANTAGONISM. 17 

tion, I think I may say, however, that the following 
ought to he accepted, as at least dealing fairly with 
both sides in the present question : 

For science, there are, in the present day, two 
chief significations, differing, however, only in ex- 
tent. In its broader sense it signifies all systema- 
tized and trustworthy knowledge. It takes, as its 
held, all that can be known with reasonable certain- 
ty, and affiliated with previous knowledge into a con- 
sistent whole. In its narrower and more -special 
sense, science, in modern times, has come to be re- 
stricted to that portion of systematized and certain 
knowledge which can be gained by a study of the 
physical universe. 

Religion has also two main significations : 
1. In its most general significance it is the ex- 
pression of mail's spiritual nature awakening to 
spiritual tilings. As the spiritual nature manifests 
itself in the \ arious channels of the human organism, 
this expression takes on various forms. Manifested 
through the intellect, it gives us religious knowl- 
edge or belief ; through the heart, religious senti- 
ments and attractions ; through the executive or- 
gans, religious worship and action. This expression 
of the spiritual nature varies, of course, in strength, 
clearness, and elevation. In some, especially in 
savage races and early times, it is gross and feeble ; 
in others it is intense, pure, and lofty. Primitive- 
ly, it gave very likely only a sense of occult intelli- 
gent energies, animating the man, the cloud, the 



18 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

wind, the sky, looked upon with fear, placated, 
shunned, or defied ; ultimately, it rises to a recogni- 
tion of a moral and spiritual being in man capable 
of eternal existence, and attains also a sense of an 
Infinite and Creative Spirit, on whom man is de- 
pendent, and to whom he owes gratitude, obedience, 
and reverence. 

This is the broader signification of religion. 

2. In a more special sense it is restricted to the 
particular beliefs or knowledges attained to in this 
unfolding of the spiritual nature. As these beliefs 
or knowledges form the justification for the senti- 
ments and action which constitute the rest of re- 
ligion, the first come to be spoken of as the whole 
of religion. Of these beliefs, some are inessential, 
some essential. Where the line should be drawn 
has been hotly disputed, and every one, almost, 
makes a different enumeration. It seems to me 
that only three can be properly regarded as neces- 
sary to the very existence of religion : 

1. Belief in a soul within man. 

2. Belief in a sovereign Over-soul without. 

3. Belief in actual or possible relations between 
them. 

Now, if the significations of science and reli- 
gion may be taken to be substantially such as they 
have just been given, there is certainly no rightful 
antagonism between them. 

Looking at the relations of the two from the 



NO NECESSAR Y ANT A G ONISM 1<J 

point of view of the first definition of science, i. e., 
systematized knowledge in general, then religion in 
its first signification, as the expression of man's 
spiritual nature, would be just a part of the facts 
which science is to study and systematize. The 
sentiments of gratitude and aspiration, the peculi- 
arities of worship, the forms of belief which reli- 
gious history exhibits, are just as much phenomena 
of the world, just as much facts of the Kosmos, as 
the markings of a flower or the transformation of a 
butterfly. Nay, they are the noblest and the most 
significant of phenomena, and Science could never 
claim to be complete if it did not receive them as a 
subject of inquiry and systeinatization. The result 
of such an inquiry and systeinatization of spiritual 
facts would constitute religious science. Religion, 
in the more special sense, "the particular knowl- 
edges or beliefs attained to by the awakening of 
man's spiritual nature," more or less coincides with 
this, and forms a subdivision of science, just in the 
degree that its doctrines are valid and systematically 
coordinated with each other and the facts which 
were their data. Normally, then, science is not 
complete till religion, in its general signification, be- 
comes one of its objects of investigation, and, in its 
special signification, becomes a part of science itself. 
Science can no more have grounds for a quarrel with 
religion than she can have grounds for a quarrel with 
the phenomena of atomic affinity, molecular vibra- 
tion and molar attraction and repulsion, or be at 



20 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

odds with the systematization of these phenomena 
into laws of chemistry and electricity, and with the 
inferring from them of chemical and electrical forces 
as causes. If the phenomena of religion appear in- 
congruous with other phenomena, they are not there- 
fore to be denied, or ignored, or ridiculed, but studied 
with the more care, as likely to reveal new laws and 
causes. If the laws and causes at present assigned 
to them seem erroneously inferred, it is the business 
of Science to assist Religion in making a better sys- 
tematization of her facts. 

Looking at the question next from the stand-point 
of the more special sense of science, the systematized 
knowledge derived from the study of the physical 
universe, then religion, both in its general and spe- 
cial sense, would, to a certain extent, stand outside 
of science. Science and religion would each have 
in a certain sense separate fields, or rather separate 
beginnings and points of view. They would not 
then be antagonistic, but supplementary. If, now, 
looking at different realms of the Kosmos, they 
should both come to the same result on any point, 
such as the existence of God or the soul, the agree- 
ment of such independent investigations would have 
especial weight. But, if they should fail to see ex- 
actly the same thing, this would not put them into 
antagonism, but rather would be what we should ex- 
pect. Diverse posts of observation naturally give 
diverse views, especially when the subject of study, 
as in this case, is immense and complex. Positive 



NO NECESSAR Y ANTA G ONISM. 21 

testimony, of course, would have to be received 
from both, and united as well as might .be. But 
negative testimony from one side would be of no 
avail to contradict the positive testimony from the 
other. Because the touch feels none of the sound- 
vibrations of the air, this throws no discredit on the 
testimony of the ear that it hears sounds. The fact 
that the eye sees no odor come from the flower es- 
tablishes no antagonism between it and the olfactory 
organ that smells it. If physical science -reports that, 
neither by the balance, the dissecting-knife, nor the 
lens, it has found trace of any spiritual Being, this 
no more disproves the direct testimony of the reli- 
gious faculties, that by their methods and organs they 
do find it, than the inability of the spiritual facul- 
ties to discover the laws of motion and matter dis- 
proves the testimony of science to them. If the in- 
vestigation of Nature should not disclose anywhere 
(though I believe it does everywhere) evidence of a 
First Cause, this would no more contradict religion 
than the failure of religion to disclose the secondary 
causes of phenomena contradicts science. The word 
of each is good for its own account, and in its own 
sphere. Contradiction, and necessary antagonism, 
would arise only by one establishing the non-exist- 
ence of the other's domain, and the entire fictitious- 
ness of the sources of knowledge it claims, a thing 
which either of the two would have to step squarely 
outside of its own proper field even to begin to at- 
tempt. Modern physical science, especially, could 



22 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS. KNOWLEDGE. 

not rightfully essay this, for one of its cardinal prin- 
ciples is the unity of the whole universe, the latent 
truth and reality of all persistent forces. In point 
of fact, the extreme outcome of modern scientific re- 
searches essays no disproof of the religious theories 
of the woi Id, nor any demonstration that there is no 
Grod in the world, nor soul in man, but simply pre- 
sents a confession of the insufficiency of physical in- 
quiry to attain, as yet, by inductive methods, a similar 
result. Nay, it does not seek to deny, but it openly 
avows, that there is an infinite mystery behind and 
beneath all the phenomena which it studies, all the 
laws it has formulated, all the secondary causes it 
has reached. Some men of science, it is true, from 
this inability of their own processes, as yet, to fathom 
the mystery, deny that any method or faculty can 
fathom it. But this is no correct inference. It is, 
instead, a groundless, a thoroughly unscientific as- 
sumption. It is the faith of science that progress in 
knowledge is unending. The man of science must 
be always seeking. To identify the limit where prog- 
ress is at present arrested with the absolute limit of 
possible knowledge is opposed to the whole spirit of 
modern inquiry. Nor, if Science concludes that its 
own methods and instruments are unavailing to reach 
religious truth, is that a reason for rejecting also the 
testimony which the spiritual faculties have from of 
old given to spiritual things? Eather, it is an ad- 
monition to the earnest seeker to turn in prefer- 
ence to this other oracle as the proper interpreter 



NO NECESSAR Y ANT A ONISM. 9 3 

of the divine mysteries, and the better guide to its 
treasures. 

From the scientific stand-point, then, there is no 
rightful quarrel between Science and Religion. 

Is there any from the religious stand-point? 
What is there in this expression of man's spiritual 
nature, in any of its legitimate manifestations, that 
demands of it to draw a sword against knowledge of 
any kind ? Which one of these expressions of the 
spiritual nature is it that needs to fight physical 
science ? Is it love, aspiration, reverence, self-sacri- 
fice, or any other of the religious sentiments ? Is it 
philanthropy, purity, justice, consecration, or any 
other element of the religious life? Surely, none 
of these may properly eonabjat science. Nor has the 
intellectual expression of the spiritual nature, the 
fundamental beliefs which, in a special sense, are 
called religion, any better reason for opposition to 
science. For the religious believer, just in propor- 
tion to the strength of his belief in the Creative 
Power, the Divine Omnipotence and Omnipresence, 
must believe that Nature is no independent power, 
man's perceptive and reasoning faculties no unmean- 
ing or deceptive instruments, but that both physical 
and human nature are works of God, existing as 
he wishes them to exist, reflecting his mind and 
purposes, and therefore trustworthy witnesses of 
him. ISTo opening of men's eyes to the facts of the 
world, no disclosing of the actual methods and laws 
of the Creation, can do any thing else (so the truly 



24 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

religious should believe) than reveal the more clear- 
ly the existence and character of their Maker. It 
may reveal him as acting in ways that we had not 
supposed. It may compel Theology to revise its 
schemes. But this revision Religion must look upon 
as received from God's own hand, and simply bring- 
ing us nearer the divine reality and truth. He who 
confounds the march of intellect with the opera- 
tions of the devil, evidently inclines to trace his 
own origin to Satan rather than to believe the word 
of Scripture, that man was made in the image of 
God, and that God saw all the works that he had 
made, and behold they were good. To the intelli- 
gent Theist, the record which the geologist deci- 
phers in the rocks is a revelation written by the 
same divine finger as that other revelation which 
the theologian reads in the Psalms of David or the 
letters of Paul. To the enlightened Christian there 
is truth to be learned about God everywhere in the 
material and moral universe ; and no religious stud- 
ies can be regarded as complete or satisfactory that 
neglect or ignore that grand source of divine in- 
struction which God's handiwork presents to us. 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 25 



CHAPTER II. 

CAUSES OF THE ACTUAL ANTAGONISM OF THE SCIEN- 
TIFIC AND THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. 

Religion and Science, then, have no good cause 
for antagonism, but rather for amity and sympathy. 
Why, then, should they have had so many apparent 
conflicts ; why should there be so much jealousy, 
suspicion, and ill-feeling, between scientific and re- 
ligious bodies ? 

There are many causes. But the main ones are 
these three : First and chief, ignorance. Few of the 
religious have understood religion. They have been 
familiar, of course, with its practical applications; 
the forms of worship ; the moral and philanthropical 
duties which it has demanded. They have studied 
carefully Scripture texts, and writings of the fathers, 
and the creeds of the councils ; but about the funda- 
mental principles of religion, its real grounds, lim- 
its, and proper domain, there has been a great lack 
of knowledge. 

Similarly, few scientific men have really com- 
prehended science. Facts of chemistry, of astrono- 
my, of geology, they have learned with wonderful 
2 



26 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

thoroughness ; but the principles of scientific inves- 
tigation, its capabilities and limits, they have known 
little of. Physicists speak familiarly of scientific 
method, but " they could not," says Prof. Jevons, 1 
"readily describe what they mean by that expres- 
sion. Profoundly engaged in the study of particu- 
lar classes of natural phenomena, they are usually too 
much engrossed in the immense and ever-accumu- 
lating details of their special sciences, to generalize 
upon the methods of reasoning which they uncon- 
sciously employ." Prof. Jevons's words find a no- 
ticeable illustration in the fact that the only consid- 
erable treatises upon scientific method, or the prin- 
ciples of physical inquiry which have been written 
in the present century, Mill's " Logic of the In- 
ductive Sciences," Whewell's " Philosophy of the 
Inductive Sciences" and "History of Scientific 
Ideas," and Jevons's own " Principles of Science," 
are all the works of metaphysicians rather than of 
physicists, of mental philosophers rather than natu- 
ral philosophers. And if few, either of the religious 
or the scientific world, have really understood the 
principles and proper limits of their own studies, 
still fewer have understood the principles and prop- 
er sphere of the other. Prof. Trowbridge, in a re- 
cent number of The Popular Science Monthly, 
called attention to the insufficient acquaintance of 

1 Preface to "The Principles of Science," )>y W. Stanley Jevons, 
Professor of Logic and Political Economy in Owens College, Man- 
chester, England. 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 27 

ministers of religion with science. He quoted the 
courses of study presented in our principal theologi- 
cal schools, and showed how very small a measure 
of attention was given to physical studies, and how 
absurdly some preachers deliver their ignorant ipse 
dixits upon scientific topics. Although theologi- 
ans are continually declaring, that the most danger- 
ous enemy of religion to-day is science, they seem 
to have gained no realizing sense of the fact, and 
what it demands of them. They still imagine that 
the battle of the Evidences is to be fought on the 
field of ecclesiastical history, scriptural exegesis, and 
metaphysical postulates. They still practise with 
dictionary and concordance, as if the age of crucible 
and spectroscope had not come in. The great need 
of our theologians to-day is, to recognize the mighty 
turn which modern thought has taken, the new base 
of operations which it demands, and the new weap- 
ons it requires. As Hugh Miller said years ago, 
" Before the churches can be prepared, competently, 
to deal with the infidelity of an age so largely en- 
gaged as the present in physical pursuits, they must 
greatly extend their walks into the field of physical 
science." A hasty reconnaissance now and then to 
gather information to justify an attack is not what 
is wanted, but a careful and impartial examination 
of the scientific domain, and its relations with the 
religious realm. Even " from men who admire the 
progress of science," says Prof. Trowbridge, "I often 
hear sermons " which " do incalculable damage, by 



28 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

drawing wide and unwarrantable inferences and con- 
clusions from scientific facts." 

Equally inadequate is the acquaintance of men 
of science with religion. If there are among the 
clergy parsons so impervious to modern knowledge 
that they still believe that the earth is flat and im- 
movable, and that the fossils of the Silurian period 
are the remains of creatures drowned in the Flood, 
there are likewise those who claim to be men of 
science who are so ill-informed and undeveloped in 
spiritual things as to doubt the usefulness of devo- 
tion, look on Christianity as a work of fraud, and 
religion and morality as mere products of fear and 
custom. It does not need to be argued, I think, 
that religion is not a thing to be understood at a 
glance by every one who is not a born fool. Spirit- 
ual things need special, systematic, thorough study for 
their clear comprehension just as much as physical 
things ; and the man of science who essays, because 
he is skillful with acids and alkalies, or has made 
notable discoveries about sound, or heat, or protozoa, 
to pronounce judgment on the problems of prayer 
and providence, or the knowability of God, such a 
man is just as likely to talk nonsense as the minister 
who denounces Darwinism without having read a 
tithe of the scientific expositions and evidence of it. 
Yet it is not an uncommon occurrence, of late, to 
see men of science indulge in such intellectual esca- 
pades. Dazzled by their marvelous achievements in 
measuring the stellar spaces and recovering the his- 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAG0NIS3I. 29 

tory of extinct species, physical investigators have 
fancied that Bacon and the modern instrument-mak- 
ers have supplied them with the keys of universal 
knowledge, and with unhesitating confidence have 
pronounced from their scientific platforms just what 
the world must believe about divine personality, 
goodness, spiritual existence, and such other pro- 
found problems as the great Christian thinkers have 
spent their lives in finding and expounding the best 
solutions of. It is not strange if the religious world 
should be considerably amazed, and somewhat in- 
dignant, at the crude structures which have resulted 
when these scientific Babel-builders, taking atom and 
molecule for their only architectural materials, have 
essayed to push up their materialistic towers into 
the very heaven. 

Kow, this ignorance of themselves and each other 
has, and must, as long as it lasts, work evil to both re- 
ligion and science. Unacquainted with the strength 
of each other's positions, they are prone to treat each 
other with indifference or contempt. Knowing not 
their own proper domain, or that of the other, they 
will be likely to encroach upon territory that is not 
their own, or consider themselves invaded or insult- 
ed without cause. The sight of blunders and bun- 
gles committed in these foreign excursions, tends to 
destroy their authority and respect for their knowl- 
edge in their own home-province. " Nothing leads 
thinking young men of scientific tendencies," says 
Prof. Trowbridge, " to neglect church-going more 



30 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

than wrong-headed and illogical deductions from 
science by their pastors." And, similarly, I may 
add, "nothing leads Christians to dislike and ignore 
scientific teaching more than the gross misrepresen- 
tations of pure religion too often given by scientific 
lecturers." It is those who are most ignorant of 
modern investigations, and most unfitted by their 
whole education to discern their bearing, who most 
freely launch the theological thunder-bolts at them, 
as impious and godless. And it is those who know 
least of the essence of religion and the grounds on 
which it is based, who sneer at them as old wives' 
tallies, unworthy the serious consideration of any 
savant. Every such uncalled-for attack on one side 
or the other widens the breach between them. Could 
each know the other more thoroughly, most of this, 
I believe, might be escaped. As one of our Ameri- 
can preachers said recently in an address to medical 
students, 1 " If the clergy could ramble with Mr. Hux- 
ley over the glaciers, and Mr. Huxley would take an 
excursion into the fields of Christian history, we 
should have better clerical sermons and better lay 
sermons.'''' 

Ignorance of themselves and each other is, then, 
the first and main cause of that antagonism between 
science and religion which, though it can have no 
de jure reign, has yet had an undeniable de facto 

1 Delivered to the graduating class of the New York College of 
Physicians and Surgeons, 1875, by Rev. E. A. Washburn, D. D. 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 31 

existence. From this main cause there have flowed 
two subordinate ones : 

1. A confounding of both religion and science 
with other things. 

2. The claiming by each of exclusive knowledge, 
and, in consequence of it, a supremacy over the 
other. 

These must be examined somewhat in detail. 

First, ignorance of the true nature of religion 
and science has led to confounding them with other 
things. All science, certainly, does not deserve the 
sneering appellation which some clergymen are fond 
of employing — of " science falsely so called." But 
not a few things that pass for science have no real 
claim to the title. They are but metaphysical falla- 
cies, probable hypotheses, or conjectures spawned in 
the fertile fancy of scientific dabblers, embraced by 
anti-religious prejudice, and wind-blown by conceit 
and love of sensation into every puddle of superfi- 
cial Nature-knowledge. 1 

So it is also with religion. It is not all false- 
hood and masquerade ; nevertheless, there is much, 
popularly set down as religion, which is no more 
religion than it is science. Now it has been bound 
up with one system, now with another. When 

1 " There is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious 
and misleading philosophy (' oppositions' of science falsely so called ') 
abroad in the world at the present day." — (Dr. Carpenter's Address 
at Brighton, in 1872, as President of the British Association for the 
Advancement of Science.) 



32 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

Christianity first raised its head, it was told that 
polytheism alone was religion. When Protestant- 
ism first ventured to send Christians directly and 
personally to the Bible and their own private judg- 
ment, religion, it was declared, meant simply the 
Roman Church, and all else was infidelity. In Au- 
gustine's day, Christianity was made inseparable 
from the doctrines of predestination and fatalism. 
In Abelard's time it was bound up with the meta- 
physics of realism ; in Roger Bacon's, with the 
philosophy of Aristotle; in the days of Yesalius, 
with the medical treatises of Galen ; in the life- 
time of Galileo, with the astronomy of Ptolemy. 
To-day it is the orthodoxy of the Council of Trent 
or the Westminster Catechism that is cemented to 
religion, and any attack on the one is assumed to 
be undermining the very foundations of faith and 
morals. 

Now, it is this false science, and this false reli- 
gion — this confounding of other things, different in 
character, with these two great factors of human 
welfare (a confusion the more readily occurring be- 
cause of the sanction that both the scientific and the 
religious worlds have given to it), that has led to the 
belief that there is a natural antagonism between 
physical inquiry and spiritual faith. These other 
powers may be natural opponents to Science, or 
natural opponents to Religion, or natural oppo- 
nents to each other, and, walking in the guise of 
Science and Religion, readily give the appear- 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 33 

anee of a continual and rightful conflict between 
them. 

There are metaphysical doctrines, for example, 
that are inimical to the very existence of religion ; 
and these metaphysical doctrines may happen to be 
adopted by certain scientific authorities, become cur- 
rent in scientific circles, and be expounded as if they 
were scientific truths. Auguste Comte, for instance, 
laid it down as the characteristic of the advance of 
knowledge from the Theological and Metaphysical 
stage to the Positive or truly Scientific stage, that it 
should be recognized that only phenomena, their 
coexistences and secuiences, were knowable ; and 
Causes, especially the First Cause, beyond the pos- 
sibility of our knowledge. Herbert Spencer, Prof. 
Tyndall, Prof. Huxley, and many other popular sci- 
entific authorities have, again and again, in scientific 
lectures and treatises, taken occasion to lay it down 
as one of the fixed things which the physical in- 
quirer should recognize and respect, that the Su- 
preme Eeality is utterly unknowable. Were these, 
indeed, truths of science, then Eeligion would have 
no enemy more to be dreaded ; for, if the God 
whom she has worshiped and prayed to, and taken 
as her lawgiver, and believed that she has held com- 
munion with, is absolutely unknowable — then, in- 
deed, no place is left for her on the earth. Not 
" worship, mainly of the silent sort," as Prof. Hux- 
ley advises, but the absolute suppression of every 
worshiping instinct and reverent thought, becomes 



34 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

her. But, without discussing at all here this great 
question of the knowability of God, I would point 
out what hardly ought to be required to be men- 
tioned, that this contest lies in a field quite outside 
of the beat of Science. Science can declare what it 
has found and does know, and what it has not yet- 
found out and does not yet know ; but, as to what 
it is possible or impossible to know, as to what are 
the necessary and absolute limits of the hum an mind 
— this is a question of metaphysics, not of science. 
The whole argument proceeds through a discussion, 
not of physical things, but of mental and spiritual — 
laws of thought, analyses of consciousness, contra- 
dictions of logic. It is a question in which all the 
chief arguments, -pro and con, were elaborated before 
modern Science was born. If scientific authorities 
chose to borrow or reiterate what Lao-Tse, Kant, 
Hamilton, or Mansel, have argued, that does not 
transform the old metaphysics into modern science, 
but simply exhibits modern scientists as amateur 
metaphysicians. 

Again, there are speculations and theories op- 
posed to religion, which are often indulged in by 
scientific men, and passed off for genuine science. 
Such, for example, is the bald materialism that 
would make matter the sum and substance of all 
things; self-existent and alone immortal; life, its 
complex product ; thought, a motion of it ; will, 
the direction of its current. Such is the scientific 
naturalism, still more prevalent, perhaps, among 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM 35 

physical inquirers, in which the uniformity per- 
ceived within the narrow field of human observa- 
tion is set up as an absolute necessity ; succession of 
phenomena is made the only reality ; its chain of 
antecedents the only origin; and its law the only 
God. These theories may have a g"w$<s?'-scientific ba- 
sis ; they may be advocated by students, teachers, 
and writers of the scientific world ; but, nevertheless, 
they have no claim to call themselves science ; they 
have never been accepted by a majority of the scien- 
tific world ; no proper and sufficient scientific author- 
ity, data, or reasoning, indorses them ; no scientific 
verification of them is possible. Their dogmas, as- 
suming for matter eternal and exclusive existence ; 
asserting for our narrow experience universality and 
necessity ; claiming, in regard to phenomena, a 
knowledge that there is nothing more behind it 
than is seen on its surface ; denying altogether finite 
or infinite spirit ; repudiating the intuitions of 
cause and substance — transcend altogether the ex- 
perimental conditions which these same schools 
make the limit of knowledge and the criterion of 
truth. Inductive Science would have to renounce 
its functions, and assume quite a different role, be- 
fore it could legitimately make any such declara- 
tions. As Dr. Carpenter said at Brighton, in 18Y2, 
in his address to the British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, " Those who set up their own 
conceptions of the orderly sequence which they dis- 
cern in the phenomena of ISTature as fixed and deter- 



36 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

mined laws, by which those phenomena not only 
are (within all human experience), but always have 
been, and always must be, invariably governed, are 
really guilty of the intellectual arrogance which 
they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and 
place themselves in diametrical antagonism to those 
real philosophers by whose comprehensive grasp 
and penetrating insight that order has been so far 
disclosed." And again, toward the close of his ad- 
dress: "When Science, passing beyond its own lim- 
its, assumes to take the place of Theology, and sets 
up its own conception of the order of Nature as a 
sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a prov- 
ince of thought to which it has no claim, and not 
unreasonably provokes the hostility of those who 
ought to be its best friends." 

Or, to pass to the things that, in the name of re- 
ligion, have opposed science : ecclesiastical hierar- 
chies have always been, and almost inevitably are, 
hostile to its progress. They are opposed to all prog- 
ress. Their one great thought is, to preserve their 
privileges, to maintain and heighten their authority. 
When a religious movement grows into a church, it 
is as when the young polyp grows into the coral. 
At first tiny, soft-bodied, changeable, ranging at 
will, as it increases in size it loses its freedom and 
pliancy, attaches itself to some rock, becomes im- 
movable, solid, itself a part of the rock. To new 
ideas it can henceforth give, at best, only a stolid 
apathy, a stony rebuff. Fortunate is the issue if it 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 37 

does not heave its ponderous weight upon the rash dis- 
turber of its peace, and crush him to powder. Alas ! 
how many tragic instances of this are written in blood 
and fire upon the pages of church history ! Colum- 
bus, overwhelmed by the theologians at Salamanca 
with biblical proof against a new world ; Kopernik, 
suppressing his heliocentric theory of the heavens 
for thirty-six years, and escaping persecution only 
by death ; Galileo, tortured and compelled to recant 
his declaration that the earth moves ; Giordano Bru- 
no, burnt alive for daring to assert a plurality of 
worlds— such are the disgraceful illustrations of the 
enmity of the Roman hierarchy to the progress of 
physical knowledge. But do any of these facts show 
a conflict between Religion and Science ? Not one 
of them. Neither the Roman Church nor any other 
church is identical with religion. No ecclesiastical 
body is synonymous with religion. All such bodies 
are structures of men, social institutions. Religion 
is no human construction, any more than the force 
of gravitation, or the vital force, or the yearnings 
of the loving heart. It is a force anterior to all 
churches and hierarchies, the grand spiritual stream 
flowing from above through the souls of men, of 
which ecclesiastical organizations are but the earth- 
ly banks, the clayey reservoirs and wooden dams 
by which men have thought they could better util- 
ize the heavenly forces. Doubtless religion is in 
the Church, and the Church more or less representa- 
tive of religion ; but by no means so exclusively and 



38 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

purely is the Church filled and moved by religion, 
that the voice of the latter may be taken as the voice 
of the former. Besides religion, the Church has al- 
ways contained, and still contains, much else — tradi- 
tion, prejudice, love of power, superstition. The 
clamor of these often confuses and drowns the still, 
small voice of religion. 

Again, theological dogmas and science have been, 
and still are, opposed. Theologians have formulated 
their dim guesses about God's character and ways 
into creeds, and imagined them finalities. They 
have speculated upon matters of purely physical 
knowledge, such as the antiquity of the earth and 
the age of man, the condition of the primitive globe 
and its inhabitants, the manner and method of their 
appearings, and have made these speculations into 
dogmas held as essential to religion. Thus, holding- 
sway beforehand, by right of what might be called 
squatter sovereignty, over a large part of the field 
of scientific inquiry, and having consecrated as sa- 
cred edifices the rude and hasty structures raised 
by its early conjectures, when Science advances to 
take possession of its own, there results naturally a 
conflict. The different stand-points from which Sci- 
ence observes, the more thorough examination which 
it is its aim to make, give a more or less different 
representation of truth. Science must clear the 
ground of what it deems erroneous mental construc- 
tions before it can erect the systems which it believes 
to be truer. And Theology has become so convinced 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 39 

of the divine accuracy of iis own models of the Cre- 
ator and the creation, that if the old lines be altered 
ever so little, if new elements be suggested as con- 
stituting the constructive material, or an architect- 
ural power, different from that which the ancient 
guide-books narrate, be hinted at as the method by 
which it was built, or if even one of the withered 
ivies that had darkened its windows be pulled away, 
then it seems to Theology as if desecration had been 
committed, the creation robbed of its divineness, 
and the Creator banished into nonentity. 

All theologies are liable thus to get in the way of 
Science ; but in current Christian theology there are 
two dogmas in particular that have especially created 
antagonism. The first is the assumed infallible inspi- 
ration of the whole Bible ; the second the assumed 
intervention of God in the order of Nature, or the 
special presence of Deity in that which is mysteri- 
ous, exceptional, or lawless. In consequence of the 
first of these dogmas, there has been a struggle by 
theologians to limit modern science to the contract- 
ed circle of the ancient Hebrew knowledge of the 
universe, and any variation of statement from the 
letter of Moses or Job, David or Paul, is regarded 
as a dangerous loosening of another screw in the 
bonds of righteousness and the evidences of immor- 
tality. 

In consequence of the second dogma, theologians 
have been jealous of any attempt at a natural ex- 
planation of the mysteries of the world, and have 



iO PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

looked upon every extension of the realm of un- 
broken order and second causes as an invasion by 
Science of the religious kingdom. They imagine 
that one must lose whatever the other gains ; that, 
step by step, as the arcana of the Kosmos are pene 
trated, and the same laws and substances are found 
ruling and constituting these, as rule and constitute 
the more familiar parts and operations of Nature, 
the action and presence of Deity must be denied, 
and the human mind landed more and more in the 
slough of a godless materialism. 

But these also are antagonisms which faith is not 
responsible for, and which Theism does not com- 
mand. These are quarrels in which pure and unde- 
filed Religion is never present as a combatant. The- 
ology is not religion, but the theoretical system men 
erect over and about religion. " The aspiring song of 
the spirit is one thing, the attempt to write its score, 
define its nature and explain its methods and its sig- 
nificance, quite another thing." There are many the- 
ologies, and each theology has many dogmas. Reli- 
gion is an essence which was before all, which gave 
to all their original life, but remains identical with 
none. Least of all is it to be identified with a dogma 
that divorces ordinary Nature from God, confines 
his working to the dark corners of his creation, and 
recognizes him only where some overthrowal or in- 
terruption of his previous or customary work is sup- 
posed to be discovered. It is not only an equally 
religious view, but a far more religious view, it 



CAUSES OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 41 

seems to me, that sees God present in every ordi- 
nary occurrence and lowest substance, pouring his 
will through the channels of unvaried law, and 
binding antecedent to consequent in an unflawed 
succession. 

Neither is religion based on nor bound up with 
any one book. Had Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no 
religion, because Moses had not yet written ? Was 
there no Christianity in the lifetime of Jesus, or 
the first forty years of the apostolic generation, be- 
fore Matthew put his pen on to parchment? As 
well say that chemical affinity is based on Lavoisier's 
or Dalton's treatises, or that gravitation is ruined if 
Newton's "Principia" is shown false in a single the- 
orem. Keligion is the root from which what is di- 
vine and spiritual in Old and New Testament has 
blossomed. But the manifold other growths, of his- 
tory, poetry, allegory, chronology, cosmogony, which 
pious reverence bound up in the same venerated 
chaplet, must not be confounded with the grand 
moral and religious truths that have given the an- 
cient Semitic writings an incomparable place in sa- 
cred literature. " Physical and metaphysical sci- 
ence," to quote the Dean of Canterbury again, 1 
" alike lie remote from the object-matter of revela- 
tion. Because God has in the Bible given us reve- 
lation in an informal way, in order, perhaps, to com- 

1 " Science and Revelation," by R. Payne Smith, D. D., Dean of 
Canterbury, Late Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford. "Modern 
Skepticism," " Lectures of the Christian Evidence Society," p. 173. 



42 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

mend it to our entire nature, people often forget 
that its proper object-matter is simply the moral re- 
lation in which man stands to God, especially with 
relation to a future state of being. Religions men 
forget this. They often take up an antagonistic 
position to science, and try to make out systems of 
geology, and astronomy, and anthropology, from the 
Bible, and from these judge all that scientific men 
say. Really, the Bible never gives us any scientific 
knowledge in a scientific way. If it did, it would 
be leaving its own proper domain." 

In fine, to come to the secret of the dissension, 
new kinds of knowledge, or unusual theories of any 
kind, naturally find themselves opposed by the old 
beliefs — whatever be their nature — which occupied 
the ground before them. The old is unwilling to 
give up its time-honored reign. The new wants to 
push out the old, to obtain more room for itself. 
Now, what is old, whether it be really ancient phi- 
losophy, ancient custom, 1 ancient myth, or ancient 

1 Euripides, for example, puts the following into the mouth of 
Greek orthodoxy: "The divine might is slow to conic forth, but sure 
nevertheless; and it chastises those mortals who foster insensate ob- 
stinacy, who from mad opinion refuse to exalt the institutions of the 
gods. Subtly and perseveringly do they hide their feet in ambush 
and catch the impious man. For never should we indulge convic- 
tions and meditations which are wiser than established practices. 
For cheap is the effort to believe that the Divinity, whatever else he 
may be, is not powerful ; and what comes from long time is estab- 
lished eternally, and inheres in Nature." — (Euripldbs, ifcwcA., 882- 
896.) The impiety here rebuked consisted in disapproving of Hac- 
chanalian orgies ! 



UA'U&Et! OF ACTUAL ANTAGONISM. 43 

physical speculation, or any thing else no more iden- 
cal with religion, has always been apt to lay claim 
to a sacred character. And what is new, whether it 
be, in fact, new metaphysics, new religion, or new 
speculation of any kind, is in these days equally apt 
to dub itself by the title of Science. But surely the 
old, merely as old, is no more to be identified with 
religion than the new. Though tradition may al- 
ways claim Religion as her champion, Religion is not 
therefore responsible for Tradition's acts. Scientific 
men, as well as priests and churches, have sought to 
bolster themselves by appeals to the odium theologi- 
cum. Even the illustrious Leibnitz charged the sys- 
tem of Newton with having an irreligious tendency. 
And Religion, when new, is as apt as Science to be 
accused of impiety. If any body of men were ever 
filled with the thought of God, surely the early 
Christians were ; and yet, one of the charges which 
the Roman poly cheists brought against them was 
that of atheism. It is not religion, then, but tradi- 
tion, that opposes the new ; and it is not the new 
any more than the old that is the scientific. If all 
uncommon theories and recent-born speculations be 
science, how many scientific carcasses line the path 
of history ! 



44 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWT.EDQR 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CLAIM OF RELIGION TO POSSESS EXCLUSIVE KNOWL- 
EDGE AND CONSEQUENT DIVINE SUPREMACY. HU- 
MAN CONDITIONS OF RELIGION. DIVINE ORIGIN OF 

SCIENCE. HELP RECEIVED BY RELIGION FROM SCI- 
ENCE. 

Secondly, there are the claims made by both 
Science and Religion of exclusive knowledge, and. as 
a result of this, a rightful supremacy over the other. 

I take up first the claim of Religion. It is one 
of the most ancient claims of Religion that to her 
has been given truth in its absolute purity, direct 
from Heaven. Scientific investigations are but blind 
human gropings. There is nothing divine or heaven- 
descended in them. But religion is a revelation 
from the Creator himself, conveying absolute and 
final truth. No human admixture alloys its cer- 
tainty; no sense-experience nor logical demonstra- 
tions are needed to make it credible ; no further 
principles are to be sought for. God has unveiled 
to man in advance all the information about spiritual 
things which it is essential for him to have. For 
the human understanding to pick and dig about 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 45 

these foundations is either superfluous or injurious. 
If its investigations agree Avith the divine revela- 
tion, they are but a waste of energy. If they dis- 
agree, they are beyond doubt mischievous mislead- 
ings. Religious truths are not like scientific truths. 
Spiritual phenomena are not like material phenom- 
ena. They are to be gazed at reverently, not searched 
into with microscope and dissected with lancet. 
They should be accepted in faith, not criticised by 
impious reason. Of eternal and infinite importance, 
as they are, what is man that he should set himself 
up as their judge ? " In the things of God," Mr. 
Mansel tells us to-day, as Augustine, and Aquinas, 
and Calvin, and Edwards, and the great Church au- 
thorities in every century, have told the world, " Rea- 
son is beyond her depth, and we must accept what 
is established, or we must believe nothing." 

Almost every branch of the Church claims more 
or less of this exclusive knowledge. Each has some 
oracle whose voice must be accepted as authoritative, 
and whose message as divine truth, unmixed with 
the dross of common human knowledge, needing 
not that examination and verification which other 
kinds of truth require before it is worthy to claim 
man's credence. 

At its lowest term, this oracle is merely the 
spiritual intuition, the voice within the breast. In 
its next higher form, it is the word of the religious 
master ; in Islam, of Mohammed ; in Buddhism, of 
Sakya-Mouni ; in Christianity, of Jesus. At a third 



46 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

stage, it presents as infallible every verse of some 
sacred book — Veda, Koran, Bible. At its highest 
term, the Church, or, perhaps, its official head, Iligh- 
priestj Grand-Llama, Mikado, or Pope, becomes the 
vicegerent of God, and the exclusive declarer of 
divine truth. 

Believing that in herself she has thus a special, 
direct, and unerring source of divine knowledge, Re- 
ligion naturally is disinclined to admit the possibility 
that she has made mistakes, or that Science is com- 
petent to correct her, or to find out religious truths 
undiscovered by her. The investigations of Science 
are very well as long as they confirm the Scriptures, 
and sustain the Church ; but to stray from the ortho- 
dox pathway, to criticise or contradict what Penta- 
teuch or Papal College has laid down, is a sacrilege. 
Evangelical Protestantism, by instance after instance, 
has disclosed its unwillingness to allow to Science 
any other position than that of a subordinate and a 
satellite ; and the Roman Church has explicitly and 
officially declared the absolute supremeness of the 
Church in all such matters, and the wickedness of 
looking upon Science as capable of correcting the 
interpretations of the Church. In the General Coun- 
cil of the Roman Church, held in 1870, known as 
the Vatican Council, it was defined to be " a doc- 
trine divinely revealed, that when the Roman 
Pontiff speaks ex cathedra .... he possesses that in- 
fallibility with which the Divine Rdeeemer willed 
his Church to be endowed. . . . The pastors and 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 47 

faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, are bound by 
the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obe- 
dience " in reference to doctrines thus defined by 
the pope. And in regard to human science, in par- 
ticular, the position previously taken by the Papal 
See was ratified by the formal decree : 

" Let him be anathema — 

"Who shall say that human sciences ought to 
be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one 
may be allowed to hold as true their assertions even 
when opposed to revealed doctrines ; 

" Who shall say that it may at any time come to 
pass in the progress of science that the doctrines set 
forth by the Church must be set forth in another 
sense than that in which the Church has ever re- 
ceived and yet receives them." 

Languagq such as this makes it plain that, what- 
ever be the tendency in the more liberal Protestant 
communions, the Koman Chnrch has no thought of 
abandoning the theories of human and cosmic origin 
which it has planted itself on in times past, or en- 
couraging any study which would naturally or prob- 
ably lead to doubt of the authority of the Church 
which has enunciated them. 

Ancient and common as is this claim of Religion, 
I believe it to be erroneous. It cannot stand before 
thorough criticism and sonnd logic. Religion has 
no exclusive source of information, but such sources 
only as are common to all branches of human knowl- 
edge. Every oracle that has ever been set up in the 



4S PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

Church, as the voice of the Divine, lias had and still 
has its human conditions and vehicles. I would not 
deny the great fact of revelation, proceeding from 
God, for the enlightenment of man. We come to 
perceive religious truth — yes, and secular truth also, 
I rejoice to believe — not merely by our own unaided 
efforts, but by the help of the divine illumination 
"constantly vouchsafed to the earnest seeker after 
truth. 

But, living in the world in which we do, within 
the material organisms in which our spiritual na- 
tures are embodied, possessed of no other knowing 
faculties than these Unite ones of ours, how is it 
possible for us to receive divine truth in its absolute 
fullness and purity % How can man either appre- 
hend it, or interpret it, or know it as divine, without 
the revelation becoming subject to those finite limi- 
tations which are the conditions of human thought ? 

However undoubtedly and exclusively a revela- 
tion may have had its beginning with God, how can 
it reach man's consciousness except through the sen- 
sitive and rational avenues of the organism in which 
God has set man's soul ? And these perceptive ave- 
nues will inevitably give shape to the message that 
passes through them. These mental windows will 
tint with the color of their own glass whatever light 
streams through them. 

The pint pot cannot hold a quart. The earthy 
soul cannot take in the spiritual conception. Love, 
aspiration, self-sacrifice, divine communion — these 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 49 

are but sounds without sense to the carnal mind. 
Though Jehovah speak in clearest tones the law of 
righteousness from Sinai's summit over the Hebrew 
host, what is it to the flocks and herds ? what is it 
to the mixed multitude whose mouths are watering 
for the flesh-pots of Egypt ? Only so much thick 
cloud round about, and the sound of thunder and 
the blare of a great trumpet. Only to Aaron and 
Moses comes intelligible meaning. Verbal commu- 
nications, holding however lofty spiritual truth, are 
but jangling noises to a man unless some correspond- 
ing idea exists already in the man's mind which may 
welcome the message and make plain its significa- 
tion. They will either be rejected as meaningless, 
or drawn down from their noble height to some 
lower level on which they can be grasped. 

It has been said that, if a Polynesian cannibal 
was told that he ought to love his enemies, he would 
answer, " Yes, we do — both roasted and broiled ! " 
There are authentic anecdotes showing equally de- 
graded transformations of religious conceptions when 
introduced to savage minds. When Burton spoke 
to the Eastern negroes about the Deity, they eagerly 
asked where he was to be found, that they might kill 
him, for, they said, " who but he lays waste our 
homes, and kills our wives and cattle ? " 

" Why did you baptize that Iroquois % " asked a 
Huron Christian of a missionary. " If he gets to 
heaven before us Hurons, he will scalp us and turn 
us out." 

3 



50 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

The sun sends forth his radiant beams as pure 
white light. The full luminous stream bathes im- 
partially the whole earth. It comes to rock, to 
flower, to element, absolutely the same. But with 
each it becomes something quite different ; for each 
untwists the woven ray, and selects from it a diverse 
hue, according to its own inward affinities. The 
atmosphere picks out its blue; the leaves draw 
to themselves the emerald ; the iris chooses the 
purple ; the buttercup paints itself with the yel- 
low ; the cardinal-flower sucks its cells full of the 
scarlet. So it is with the illumination that the soul 
receives from the Sun of Kighteousness. There is 
one and the same light, but what is received from it 
varies according to the capacity of the recipient. 
A.s the largeness of soul in the man, and the gener- 
ousness with which the soul's doors are opened, vary, 
so do the measure of inspiration and the character 
of the revelation. Each man's God takes its figure 
and dimensions from the ideal of his own sense of 
justice, or truth, or love. It is the image of him- 
self projected on the screen of the Infinite. To sav- 
age tribes, Deity is but a mightier warrior ; to over- 
burdened, enervated races, the unspeakable peace 
of a Nirvana ; to the oppressed and down-trodden, 
he is the righteous avenger and judge ; to the ten- 
der and loving, he discloses himself as the pitying, 
ever-caring Father. 

In coming even to the first earthly recipient, 
then, revelation must take on human phases and 



TEE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 51 

become subject to finite limits. And if from the 
first recipient it is carried abroad over the world, 
and down through generations, it must subject itself 
still more to human conditions and uncertainties. 
Traveling from man to man, it subjects itself to the 
errors attendant on verbal or written communica- 
tion. Proceeding from nation to nation, it becomes 
liable to the distortions attendant on translation from 
the tongue of one into that of the other. Passing 
from a personal, inward feeling or thought into 
the external symbols or speech that maj communi- 
cate to others the truth felt within, it is exposed to 
the imperfections of language and to the errors of 
interpretation. There is no system of speech or 
written signs that can more than very inadequately 
represent the delicate shadings of our mental con 
ceptions. There is no arrangement of material 
symbols, whether of letters or of sounds, that can 
more than very coarsely image the subtile qualities 
and delicate character of spiritual things. While 
the Divine thought, which is the source of revela- 
tion, is, of course, infallible, yet how can it find any 
infallible form of words in which to clothe itself % 
And if in the past this has happened, yet, when 
the usages of language change from generation to 
generation so greatly and rapidly as they do, where 
shall we find an infallible interpreter to tell us their 
exact meaning to-day ? Or, if one be found, who 
shall infallibly interpret for us his explanations? 
We must fall back on our own fallible understand- 



52 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ings at last, for the sense of whatever revelation or 
interpretation is given to ns. 

Again, how are we to know tliat what comes to 
us claiming to be a revelation is really one 2 Here, 
again, the only judge is the fallible human conclu- 
sion of our own reason. " It must be plain," as has 
well been said, " that as far as revelation contains 
any truth that asks mental assent, it must appeal to 
the mental faculty. No one denies this, unless he 
masks clear sense under some mental sophism." The 
lofty claim made when a divine revelation is asserted 
does not thereby free the claim from the possibility 
of dishonesty or error, but makes it all the more im- 
portant to determine whether the claim be a true 
one, or the pretended revelation be only some mis- 
take, or delusion, or trick of priest or lying spirit. 
Were there but a single claim made of such a kind, 
still, faith would not be exempt from the duty of 
examination and verification. But when, as is the 
case, numerous conflicting claims are made ; when 
Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, each 
brings forward that divine revelation, it becomes an 
absolute necessity for faith to discriminate what it 
deems the false revelations from what it deems the 
true revelation. And, in doing this, it must take 
guidance from its natural presuppositions, its own 
sense of the right and the true, its own experience 
of the good. 

A man may suspend his reason in obedience to 
the authority of a church. But, in order to come to 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 53 

take such a step, lie must first employ that reason to 
bring him to a belief in the duty of so doing, and to 
select the church that rightly, in his opinion, possesses 
such a claim. John Henry Newman, it is said, de- 
clares that "the true Catholic is not he who be- 
lieves in the Church because it is right, but, he who 
submits implicitly to it without presuming to ask 
such a question." Nevertheless, how can even the 
Romanist have intelligently come to the decision 
that he ought to surrender his reason to the Church, 
unless by persuading himself that history and expe- 
rience show the claim to be a reasonable one \ 

Either Faith adopts its authority unreasonably, 
unintelligently, by the mere accident of birth, or 
circumstance, or caprice, or else she must have some 
reason for her choice ; must have sought, that is, 
the arbitership of human understanding, and found 
that approving of the claim preferred. A revelation 
which would not allow of such a confirmation, by 
the prepossessions of our reason, no thinking man 
can accept as divine. Even the man to whom im- 
mediately the knowledge of a divine truth is im- 
parted could have no faith in it without such a rati- 
fication of it by his own sense of truth. 

Suppose, for example, that to-day a spirit de- 
scended from heaven and revealed personally to us 
that the Ruler and Creator of the universe is a man 
of flesh and blood and stature, as ourselves, or a 
six-armed, eagle-headed being, such as Hindoo idols 
represent him ; or suppose this messenger from the 



54 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

other world should bring us, as a message from God, 
some farrago of nonsense, some plain contradiction 
of our moral and religious principles, what intelli- 
gent man would put the slightest faith in it ? Who 
would not say that either it was an hallucination of 
our sense, a deceit of some trickster, or if, indeed, a 
spirit-messenger, then, a messenger from the pit, not 
from the heavens. 

Do you say the truth of the revelation is shown 
by miracles ? Passing by the primary objection that 
no outward sign can overweigh the inward sense of 
truth, how can a miracle convince a man except by 
appealing to his judgment and experience? What 
else is it but an argument from the analogy of hu- 
man life, that every effect has a cause proportionate 
to it ; that these phenomena are above that order 
of things with which man is familiar, or which he 
can cause ; and, therefore, as supernatural effects, 
must have a supernatural cause ? And on what else 
does the cogency of this argument depend than upon 
a previous conviction of the veracity of God ; a con- 
viction derived partly from the human intuition of 
the same truth, partly from man's experience of Di- 
vine goodness and faithfidness. Unless we believed 
beforehand both in God's existence and in his hon- 
esty and kindness, no message, no matter how mirac- 
ulously authenticated, would be of such significance 
as either to invite our belief or even be worthy of 
much attention. 

Such human conditions and necessary imperfec- 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 55 

tions, in general, beset religious as all other knowl- 
edge. And, in particular, we may ask, where can 
faith show us any infallible oracle free from possi- 
bility of mistake and human limitation ? Will the 
Church furnish us with such a superior source of 
knowledge ? The Church is but a congregation of 
fallible men, and cannot eliminate from its sum total 
what is contained in every individual part. History 
shows but too conclusively how far from infallible 
both Church and pope have been. In its unflatter- 
ing mirror, the oracle of Rome is exhibited as con- 
victed of error in scientific matters, again and again ; 
compelled to retreat from position to position ; 
forced to correct and recorrect its interpretations. 
It is shown vacillating to and fro in regard to the 
most important ecclesiastical questions ; possessed 
of no clear or well-defined principles concerning 
many essential theological issues ; the successive 
popes refuting and overturning each other's deci- 
sions ; its councils annulling the bulls of the popes, 
and branding them as heretical, and its popes fulmi- 
nating anathemas against its councils. 1 

If this be the course that consists with infalli- 
bility, its advantage over fallible sources of knowl- 
edge is undiscoverable. 

Or will the Bible furnish us with an infallible 
authority ? 

Study its pages with a careful eye, and see. Does 

1 See "The Pope and the Council," by Janus. Translated from 
the German. Boston : Roberts Brothers. Pp. 42-62. 



56 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

it claim anywhere to be absolutely, throughout its 
whole extent from Genesis to Revelation, free from 
error % Nowhere. 

What Paul says refers only to the Old Testa- 
ment, for no gospels, and but few epistles, were 
then written ; and what he asserts is that all Script- 
ure is God-inspired — that is, filled with the breath 
of God — not infallible. And the particular purposes 
for which it is profitable he specifies. It is not for 
scientific knowledge, but " for teaching, for reproof, 
for correction, for discipline in righteousness, that 
the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly fur- 
nished unto every good work " ' (2 Timothy, iii. 16, 
17). 

The claim of Paul, criticism must admit. The 
Scripture is filled ivith the breath of God, and profit- 
able for moral and spiritual culture. In it undoubt- 
edly " men of God spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Spirit." But to the eye that would find in the 
Bible a flawless record, exempt from human liabili- 
ties, a different answer is given. Variations of style 
and diversities of thought meet it. Discrepancies 
of fact and inconsistencies in statement, which all 
the wearisome toil and subtilties of commentators 
have failed to reconcile, confront the inquirer. 
What is prescribed by the law is swept away by the 
prophet. What is said by them of old time is re- 
pealed by the Christ. Paul shows the worthlessness 

1 Translation of Geo. R. Noyes, D. D., late Hancock Professor ot 
Hebrew and other Oriental Languages at Harvard University. 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 57 

of works, and James the nothingness of faith with- 
out them. The evangelists quote mistranslations 
from the inaccurate version of the Septuagint with 
more frequency than from the supposed infallible 
Hebrew. The narratives of Genesis fail to agree 
with the records God has written in rock and bone- 
cavern, in fossil, language, and star. The list of 
books considered inspired was gradually formed, and 
has differed at different periods. Books now called 
apocryphal were formerly a part of the canonical 
Scriptures. Books formerly rejected as apocryphal 
are now reckoned as a part of the divine record. 
It is not improbable that in the course of time por- 
tions of the present canon may be transferred to the 
Apocrypha. 

The text of the Scriptures is by no means free 
from doubt, nor even from confessed error. As it 
now stands in our received version, the existence of 
no small number of erroneous readings and acknowl- 
edged interpolations is a fact known to all scholars. 
For an accurate test, there is no single manuscript 
that we can resort to. We must rely upon the criti- 
cal judgment of certain fallible men to select, out 
of many codexes, the particular word which in each 
passage they judge the most likely to be the origi- 
nal. Surely this is not the spectacle that should be 
presented by an authority "without mixture of 
error." 

Surrendering, then, the Church and the Bible, 
may we find in the Christ an authority exceptional 



58 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

and absolute ? I desire not to deny the existence of 
a divine element in Jesus. I gladly recognize him as 
the loftiest spiritual seer and teacher the world has 
seen ; the best historic embodiment of spiritual per- 
fection that we have. But we must own, if we are 
clear-sighted and frank, that in Christ himself we do 
not yet obtain an oracle exempt from the limitations 
of humanity and the conditions of earthly knowledge. 
There was in him the human as well as the divine. 
" The Word was made flesh and dwelt a mongus ; " 
and through that fleshly brain and tongue it saw and 
spoke what it saw, using the language of the day, 
addressing itself to the conceptions and issues of the 
age. Acute critics have shown clearly in the life 
and teachings of Jesus the influence of the epoch 
and nation that environed him. They have pointed 
out in the Jewish literature, preceding and contem- 
poraneous to his career, the elements of his instruc- 
tion and parallels to many of his most striking say- 
ings. In regard to those ideas of his which were 
opposed to the prevalent ones of his times, it should 
be remembered that a reaction against current ideas 
is not uncommon, and as much a natural result of 
them and evidence of their influence, as conformity 
to them. That wonderful and incomparable flower, 
whose beauty shines forth from Galilee over the 
whole world, did not, nevertheless, grow suspended 
in the air without contact with any thing else, but 
was sprung from a Jewish root, elaborated by Jewish 
nutriment, and tinted with Jewish hues. Only so 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 59 

could Jesus have got into such close contact with his 
age and nation as to gain the leverage whereby to 
fulfill his providential mission of giving to it a mo- 
tion and a revolution that should in time extend to 
all quarters of the globe. 

Or, lastly, may we find in the conscience of man, 
in his intuitions of truth and duty, or in his instincts 
of worship, an infallible oracle ? This voice within 
the heart is a channel through which the Universal 
Spirit most immediately breathes its inspiring influ- 
ence. To each individual it is his personal oracle, 
his final authority. But, to furnish us with an un- 
erring source of moral or religious knowledge, with 
an absolute authority, it has no claim. For whose 
intuition, what man's conscience, what nation's mor- 



Buddhist who thinks it a sin to kill a flea ? That of 
the Feejee parricide, or that of the filial Christian % 
That of the worshiper of idols, or that of him who 
worships God as a Spirit in spirit and in truth ? 
Every- student of history knows that the voice with- 
in the heart varies its answers in every degree of 
latitude and longitude ; has as many differences of 
expression and detail as the individuals in whom it 
whispers. 

Thus, whatever authority Religion may choose, 
none of them can give her absolute truth, none can 
exempt her from the limitations and conditions of 
human knowledge. The attempt of humanity, by 



60 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

any standard-building it can perform, by any selec- 
tion and exaltation of one expression of itself over 
another, to free itself from its native fallibility, is 
as futile as the mediaeval search for a universal sol- 
vent. If any one says he possesses the universal 
solvent, pray, in what sort of a vessel does he keep 
it? If any one says he has an infallible oracle, 
pray, by what faculty did he find it, by what 
power does he now know it, comprehend it, and 
transmit to others its decisions without loss of that 
infallibility? A man's natural fallibility, as has 
well been said, obviously cleaves to him like his 
own personality, and infects every decision which 
he makes. 

And, as Religion must recognize that her knowl- 
edge is not free from the human conditions and 
characteristics which belong to Science, may not Sci- 
ence not unlawfully claim for its knowledge also par- 
ticipation in that same divine origin which Religion 
has boasted of as its sole prerogative ? Is not sci- 
ence, on one side at least, from God — a missive tell- 
ing of the Divine existence and character? . If we 
ask the Christ, we find him from field-lily and wild- 
sparrow drawing instruction as to the love and care 
of the heavenly Father. If we ask of Paul, we re- 
ceive as answer, " The invisible things of him from 
the creation of the world are clearly seen, being un- 
derstood by the things which are made, even his 
eternal power and Godhead." If we ask of the 
Psalmist, the response comes again : " The heavens 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 61 

declare the glory of God, and the firmament show- 
eth his handiwork ; day unto day uttereth speech, 
and night unto night showeth knowledge." Or, if 
we look for ourselves, what do we find? These 
fauna and flora which Science describes are not its 
inventions. The hieroglyphics in the rocks which 
it deciphers are not of its construction. Science 
finds them there because they are there ; and they 
are there, every monotheist must say, by the permis- 
sion, by the creation of God ; for, unless we go back 
to dualism or polytheism, we must recognize God 
as the sole author of all things. Whatever facts or 
laws exist in the world are there because such was 
God's will ; whatever relations of God to Nature, 
whatever aspects of the Divine government, are dis- 
closed by physical investigations, are disclosed be- 
cause God himself first drew the picture, and then 
gave to man the eye with which to see it. As we 
discern, in the manner a house is built, the character 
of its builder, what sense of beauty he possesses, 
what carelessness or faithfulness, what folly or wis- 
dom, characterizes him, so, in the peculiarities of the 
kosmic temple, we may discover the attributes of the 
Great Architect. Whatever God has done, whatever 
God is doing, is an expression of his nature. Every 
f act,, then, which Science can tell the world, every 
law it can unravel, every force it can trace out, has 
some divine message for man. Every natural phe- 
nomenon, be it bacteria in sealed flasks, or colored 
bands in a spectrum, be it building power of mole- 



62 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

cule, mimicry of insects, natural selection among an- 
imals (provided only it be actual fact, not guess of 
man), has something to tell us of God's thoughts, 
and powers, and methods of action. All science is 
thus a revelation of the Omnipresent Worker ; every 
new discovery a fresh epistle from the creative Spir- 
it to all the churches of knowledge. And is it rev- 
erent to look on this grand unveiling of Nature's 
mysteries, these sublime disclosures of infinity, eter- 
nity, unity, and order, which Science has given us, 
as things coming without any of that inspiration 
from above which we credit to the advent of reli- 
gious knowledge ? "Was it so much easier a thing to 
discover the laws of planetary motion than to dis- 
cern the moral principles laid down in the ten com 
mandments? Is it so much less noble a thing to 
write the history of God's universe than the history 
of the tribe of Judah ? That seems to us the most 
worthy view of inspiration which limits it not to 
scribes, nor prophets, nor apostles, but makes it 
the light of all our seeing, the impulse of every 
noble effort, the uplifting force in every spiritual 
ascent. It guides the studies of a Cuvier as well 
as the legislation of a Moses ; it animates the 
thoughts of an Agassiz no less than the songs of a 
David. 

Religion, then, I say, cannot rightfully claim to 
be the sole source of knowledge. She possesses no 
lawful sovereignty over the realm of Science, but 
stands on the same ground of experience, employs 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 63 

the same human faculties, is subject to the same fal- 
lible conditions, as Science, and in her divine mes- 
sage receives not an exclusive privilege, but one 
given likewise to her comrade. How unwise, then, 
is it for her to seek to discredit Science, to endeavor 
to obstruct its progress, to reject the new light phys- 
ical inquiries are affording, and angrily to denounce 
the new conceptions of Divine existence which they 
are introducing ! Religion cannot aim a blow at Sci- 
ence without wounding herself. If Religion forbids 
us to trust God's own handwriting on the tablets of 
Nature, how can she expect the world to accept 
the revelations which have come to us in each case 
through the distorting medium of human faculties ? 
If Religion forbids us to trust the original docu- 
ments which are open to every one's inspection, 
how can she expect us to receive the record which 
has descended to us down a long line of transmis- 
sions, transcriptions, and translations, at the hands 
of fallible men ? If Religion refuse to receive the 
corrections of Science, and repulse her proffered as- 
sistance, how can she escape the pitfalls of supersti- 
tion, how can she rise to the intellectual heights, 
where she can see the divine truths wi+h unobstruct- 
ed vision ? 

Tor Faith, though she be the great heaven- 
climber, climbs with but half-open eye, in only a 
twilight light. The pure and exalted spiritual truths 
which Religion enjoys to-day were by no means the 
original immediate perception of an infallible faith- 



64 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

faculty, nor the primeval possession of a privileged 
recipient, but they have been attained only by the 
efforts of thousands of generations who have suc- 
cessively " felt after God if haply they might find 
him ;" and thus groping, straining their intellectual 
eyes, have so refined and purged the inward sense 
that the ever-present reality has become clearly 
perceptible. Not by a single bound has Religion 
sprung to the mount of vision, but step by step she 
has patiently toiled upward. " The glimmering 
wonder of original fetichism ; the wider feeling ex- 
pressed in Nature-worship, of an omnipresent secret 
of power ; the higher consciousness breaking forth 
in historical, prophetic religions, of the connection 
between this reverence for the Supreme Majesty 
and all loyalty of soul," not only has each of these 
been a phase through which Religion has had to 
pass, but the transition from one to the other has 
been by numberless gradations ; and it has been be- 
cause of the criticisms and discoveries of Science, 
more than any thing else, that this ascent has been 
made. It is only as the tides of wider knowledge 
have worn away terrace after terrace of the alluvium 
of superstition, that Religion has mounted to the 
loftier and immovable rocks of fundamental truths. 
It is only as physical inquiry, with iconoclastic ham- 
mer, has broken idol after idol, that Faith has trans- 
ferred her embrace to the purer objects, worthy of 
worship. And as Religion is indebted to Science 
for this progress of the past, so for the f uture it is 



THE CLAIM OF RELIGION. 00 

only by the same aid that she can expect further 
advancement. Instead of turning to Science the 
cold shoulder, Faith should not only welcome but 
invite her cooperation. 



66 PHYSIC A L AND RELIGIO US KNO WLED GE. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE TO POSSESS EXCLUSIVE KNOWL- 
EDGE AND RIGHTFUL SUPEEMACY. THE FAITHS OF 

SCIENCE. ITS GROUNDS AND METHODS SIMILAR TO 

THOSE OF RELIGION. 

The time, however, has gone by in which Sci- 
ence needs much help against [Religion. At the 
present day the physicists can very well take care 
of themselves against the religious. The religious 
world, to a considerable extent, is learning to lower 
its pretensions. The old claims of the exclusive 
possession of an absolute knowledge and of a right- 
ful supremacy in all matters of belief are fast drop- 
ping away. Science, by the most intelligent in the 
religious world, is coming to be recognized, not as 
a subordinate, but as an independent power ; not as 
a hostile rebel, but as a friend *and fellow-laborer. 
But, unfortunately, as the one side is dropping its 
dogmatism, the other side seems to be picking it up 
and clothing itself with it. The infallibility now to 
be feared is not so much that of the pontiff, who 
fulminates his excommunications from the Vatican, 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 67 

as that of the scientific popes, who essay, from pro- 
fessors' chairs, to lay down the precise boundaries 
within which Belief may now walk. The oracle 
that now claims an exclusive insight and certainty, 
that looks upon other avenues to truth with con- 
tempt and disbelief ; that would absorb, if it could, 
all other authority in its own, is not so much Reli- 
gion as Science. 

Look, for example, at the very word science. At 
the present day it is commonly employed in refer- 
ence to physical knowledge. Such an expression as 
the " science of religion," or the " science of God, " 
strikes us as unusual. It seems to involve a figura- 
tive extension of the word beyond its proper sphere. 
Yet, until a hundred or two hundred years ago, sci 
ence denoted merely knowledge in general, or, in a 
more special sense, systematized knowledge of any 
kind. Shakespeare speaks of " music, mathematics, 
and other sciences." In the middle ages, the science 
jpar excellence — which would have been supposed to 
be referred to, if the general word was used for some 
particular but unspecified branch of knowledge — 
was the science of theology. To express the science 
of Nature, it would have been necessary to join with 
it some qualifying adjunct. 

The change in the use of the word indicates a 
great revolution in thought. It is an interesting 
historical witness to the wonderful achievements of 
physical investigation, and to the lofty claims that it 
makes at the present day. " I alone," modern Sci- 



68 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ence tacitly says, by the very name- by which it desig- 
nates itself, "I alone am scieiitia, real knowledge; 
all else is more or less guess-work." 

And this is not merely a tacit assumption, an 
unconscious arrogance, but a claim which men of 
science nowadays are very fond of publicly pro- 
claiming. The certainty of science is contrasted 
with the uncertainty of other branches of pretended 
knowledge, especially with that of religion. Sci- 
ence, it is declared, is most careful in its require- 
ments of proof before it gives credence, Religion 
most careless. Science carefully examines Nature 
and life to see what things really are, builds up its 
laws by an inductive accumulation of fact upon fact, 
and then demands that every generalization be ex- 
perimentally verified before it is accepted as true. 
Religion, on the other hand, with pious credulity 
mounts any vaulting hypothesis that the Church may 
order her to ride, leaps heroically upon it, up mist- 
formed high-jjriori roads, toward the highest heaven, 
and, as she whirls through the dizzy heights, lets 
down link after link of deduction with as much con- 
fidence as if the chain were fastened to some immov- 
able support. Auguste Comte classes religion with 
metaphysics, as but " products of the world's crude 
infancy." " Science," says the great positive philoso- 
pher, "conducts God with honor to its frontiers, 
thanking him for his provisional services." Huxley 
presents against Religion the charge that " with her 
the belief in a proposition, because authority tells 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 69 

you it is true, or because you wish to believe it, 
which is a high crime aucl misdemeanor when the 
subject-matter of reason is of one hind, becomes un- 
der the alias of faith the greatest of all virtues when 
the subject-matter of reason is of another kind ; " 
and he would enforce upon us the wise advice, as he 
calls it, of Hume : " If we take in hand any volume 
of divinity or school metapliysic for instance, let us 
ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concern- 
ing quantity or number ? No. Does it contain any 
experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact 
and existence ? No. Commit it, then, to the flames, 
for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." 

Such are the charges currently made nowadays 
against the trustworthiness of the truths of reli- 
gion ; such are the unfavorable comparisons made 
against its methods and results as compared with 
those of science. Not a few men of eminent repu- 
tation in physical investigation have lent themselves 
to it. More of lesser knowledge have loudly exulted 
in it ; and many and many who have got some little 
smattering of modern science have thought to show 
their superior enlightenment by most extreme charges 
against the validity of religious knowledge. 

Now, I would freely admit that there has been 
and still is, among what has been currently accepted 
as religious truth, a great deal that has not been so 
certain as it should be. Theology has advanced ex- 
aggerated claims to absolute knowledge. It has in- 
dulged in most groundless hypotheses. It has made 



70 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

most unwarranted assumptions about the plans and 
counsels and inmost nature of the Godhead, and 
about the details of the future life, and about scores 
of other things entirely beyond human power to 
know. Creeds have laid down dogmas about human 
nature and Scriptural inspiration, the authority of 
prophets and apostles, the work and deeds and na- 
ture of Christ, that have shown themselves plainly 
contradictory to observation and experience, to rea- 
son and the moral sense. 

Mediaeval scholasticism especially sinned griev- 
ously in these respects. It delighted in hair-splitting 
disputations over frivolous puzzles and in endless 
speculations about things not only transcending the 
possibility of human knowledge, but destitute of any 
practical moment. Its only criterion of truth was 
the deliverances of the Church or the almost equally 
venerated Aristotle. When Bacon turned the hu- 
man mind to the pursuit of the useful and the study 
of natural things, and enjoined the method of in- 
duction and the test of verification, knowledge made 
amazing conquests. The human atom, looking forth 
from his petty pellet of planetary matter, has meas- 
ured and weighed the celestial bodies, traced their 
orbits through the heavens, divined the processes by 
which they grew from dusty nebulas into glowing 
sun or life-blessed planet ; he has tracked the subtile 
Proteus, Force, from form to form, and made it now 
fly with his messages and then drag him on his er- 
rands, and spin, and knit, and reap, and sew for him. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 71 

It is not strange, therefore, that physical science 
should have grown somewhat conceited, and ima- 
gined that its pet methods and its own narrow circle 
of work were alone compatible with any solid attain- 
ment. 

And the religious world for the most part has 
unwittingly confirmed this assumption. Finding 
the researches of modern science in geology, as- 
tronomy, ethnology, and so on, bringing up for- 
midable objections to current religious doctrines, 
instead of saying, " Religion knows only the truth : 
if the received doctrines are shown to be inconsist- 
ent with any fact, let them be revised" — instead of 
thus honestly acknowledging the possibility of some 
past errors, and removing from religion the bur- 
den of sustaining portions found to be erroneous or 
doubtful, the religious world, for the most part, has 
clung to the most incredible parts as if they were its 
most essential elements; and it has sought to justify 
them by declaring that the unconverted reason is 
incapable of comprehending the high mysteries of 
religion. Religious truth (theologians and preach- 
ers, defending the old. beliefs, have maintained) be- 
longs to another realm from ordinary kinds of truth. 
It is not to be tried by the understanding. It is not 
to be brought to the bar of common-sense — but it is 
to be discerned by the inner soul, and its evidence 
found in the soul's satisfaction in it. By this view, 
which has been advocated and defended by such men 
as Hamilton, Mansel, Baden Powell, and Faraday, 



•72 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

the field of truth is divided into two separate por- 
tions: one, the province of knowledge, where sci- 
ence holds sway ; (he other, the province of belief, 
where Religion has her throne. The two, however 
opposite they appear, can never, it is declared, really 
interfere or trouble each other. Science may estab- 
lish that, scientifically, the sloth, and the humming- 
bird, and the kangaroo, and a thousand other species 
of living creatures, could not have come from Aus- 
tralia, and South America, and Greenland, across 
seas and icy deserts, to take shelter in Noah's ark. 
Scientifically, then, it is not to be credited — that is 
all. But, as a matter of religion, it is none the less 
to be accepted. It only requires more of that faith 
without sight by which the believer should walk. 

Now, by taking this mode of defending itself 
against the incursions of modern science, the Church 
has aided much in spreading suspicion of the cer- 
tainty of its cherished doctrines. When its own 
advocates would make a believer's mind like those 
vessels that are built with water-tight compartments, 
one-half of it for the play of common-sense, the 
other for the dwelling-place of faith, such trouble- 
some things as reason and observation being securely 
locked out when the soul is at its devotions, or con- 
sidering its creed — it is exceedingly likely that those 
practically inclined should judge this realm of faith 
+ o be not a realm of fact, but of fancy. Bishops like 
he of London may exhort the modern inquirer as 
eloquently as they please to throw away doubt as 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 73 

they would a bomb-shell : but it serves only to make 
the investigator more suspicious of the validity of 
religion. He beholds science challenging for itself 
full and searching scrutiny, but his spiritual guides 
hiding away religious truth as much as possible from 
his inspection. He sees science becoming more firm- 
ly established the more vigorously it is criticised. 
He beholds Theology, meantime, grudgingly and un- 
graciously, but continuously, yielding up, before the 
steady advance of scientific investigation, one after 
another long-cherished dogma. The entire circle of 
religious truth falls under doubt. That which is 
declared to be beyond the depth of reason he sus- 
pects is only a turbid shallow of superstition ; and 
this faith, which is not knowledge, will never do for 
practical men who seek realities. The only thing 
which seems to the modern inquirer entirely worthy 
of confidence is science, and to that he looks, in min- 
gled fear and hope, to see what loved belief it shall 
next sweep away, or what modicum of religion, if 
any, it shall discover at last a scientific justification 
for. 

Now, if it be the fact that knowledge is only to 
be found within the special circle and by the special 
methods of physical science, if religion has nothing 
ecmally certain to show, then, it seems to me, the 
fate of religion, among all educated men, is already 
sealed ; and the wise will seek as soon as possible, 
in museums and scientific institutions, the only 
Teacher who can declare abiding, trustworthy truth. 
4 



74 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

And, moreover, as long as there prevails the current, 
unrefnted suspicion, that it is so — as long as' the re- 
ligious world sanctions expressly or implicitly the 
idea that theology requires, to use Huxley's phrase, 
"a different measure and a different weight from 
science," it will be impossible for it to disarm the 
hostility of scientific minds, it will be impossible for 
it to maintain its foothold in society against the 
steady crowding out which physical discoveries are 
constantly exercising upon it. If the religious do- 
main in the modern mind is not to become such a do- 
main as Strauss charges that it already is, " a domain 
resembling that of the red Indians in America, re- 
duced to constantly narrower limits by their white 
neighbors,"- it must be shown that, in its essential 
elements, it possesses certainty, not absolute certain- 
ty — for we are learning that for man there is little 
or no absolute certainty — but the same kind and 
measure of certainty as men act upon in trade and 
daily life, and especially accept unhesitatingly in sci- 
ence. 

In the last century Bishop Butler wrote a fa- 
mous argument in which he showed the analogy of 
religion to the course of Nature, and that the same 
sort of difficulties that are found in it are found also 
in the constitution of Nature. It presented strongly 
the inconsistency of those who, accepting Nature as 
the work of a wise and good God, halt before the 
difficulties which they descry in the course of reve- 
lation. But that argument, well put as it was, has 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. ?5 

lost its effectiveness against the doubters of religion 
to-day. For its corner-stone, the doubter's belief in 
Divine Creation, is just the thing now called in ques- 
tion ; and the exhibition of difficulties in Divine Cre- 
ation similar to those in revelation, instead of lead- 
ing the inquirer to accept both, rather inclines him 
to throw them both overboard. The method of that 
argument, however, has always seemed to us a good 
one, provided only some corner-stone which the 
doubter thoroughly accepted as solid could be found 
from which to start the reductio ad absurdum. 

Now this corner-stone seems to be furnished at 
the present day by physical science. It is, as we 
have just noticed, the oracle of almost every reli- 
gious doubter, the arsenal from which he draws most 
of the arrows he casts against religion, the rival for 
the suffrages of belief with which religion is unfa- 
vorably contrasted — the substitute, in fine, which his 
instincts of reverence and worship put in the place 
of G-od and constitute his Divinity. Now, if it can 
be shown that the same difficulties attend this un- 
questioned science as attend religion, and that reli- 
gion, whether or not it has absolute proof, yet has 
just as good proof as that which in physical matters 
all accept, the doubter, it seems to me, will have lit- 
tle ground left to stand upon, and the practical trust- 
worthiness of religion will be shown. 

Now this, I believe, can be shown. Knowledge 
is not a special privilege of natural science. The 
proofs and evidences of religion are just as valid. 



Y6 PHYSICAL AND RELIOIO US KNO WLEI) E 

For most of them are strikingly similar, not a few 
identical. The grounds, and methods, and results 
of spiritual knowledge are, in the main, either the 
same or closely analogous to those of accepted physi- 
cal truths. The common charges made against reli- 
gion are applicable also against contemporary science. 
Science cannot discredit religion without invalidating 
its own work; and those who unhesitatingly accept 
all the deliverances of physical investigation ought 
logically to accord the same belief to the similar 
proofs which Religion presents of her main theses. 

This similarity between religious and physical 
knowledge is what I aim to set forth in the next 
few chapters. The subject divides itself into two 
great divisions : I. A comparison of the grounds 
and methods of science with those of religion ; II. A 
comparison of the objects aimed at and the results 
reached by the two. 

I. The grounds and methods of science compared 
with those of religion. 

The means of gaining knowledge are various. 
There is — 

1. Personal observation and experience furnished 
by the senses. This may be either (a) original ; or 
(J) in verification of something already discovered, 
testified to, expected, or predicted. 

2. Intuition. This comprehends (a) immediate 
cognition of consciousness or direct mental percep- 
tions, and (h), corresponding to these, constitutional 
convictions universal and necessary among the bulk 



THE CLAIM , OF SCIENCE. ?7 

of mankind — convictions suggested and developed 
by experience, but before personal experience exist- 
ing as native predispositions, moulding and making 
possible experience, and, when developed, extending 
their affirmations beyond the limits of all experience. 

3. Testimony. This may be either (a) in witness 
of a fact, that is, evidence, or (b) in the shape of an 
opinion or judgment of some one presumed to know ; 
that is, authority. 

4. Inference, by which these various data are 
worked up. This may be either (a) deductive, that 
is, reasoning from the general to the particular ; or 
(b) inductive, reasoning from one quality in many to 
the same in all ; or (c) analogical, reasoning from sim- 
ilar qualities in one to the accompanying qualities 
in the same. 

Again, inference may be either (d) demonstra- 
tive, reaching certitude ; or (e) probable, approximat- 
ing more or less to certitude, reaching at one end of 
the scale moral certainty, at the other amounting 
simply to a theory or hypothesis. 

Now, it is a prevalent notion, especially among 
those who unfavorably contrast the methods of reli- 
gion with those of science, that of these various 
methods, science uses almost entirely the following 
four : sense-observation, induction, deduction of ex- 
perimental tests, and verification ; and has little or 
nothing to do with the opposite methods : intuitive 
cognition and belief, evidence, authority, analogy, 
and other kinds of merely probable inference. Re- 



78 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ligion, on the contrary, it is charged, neglects almost 
entirely the first set of methods, and trusts herself 
unwarrantably to the last. 

Huxley, for example, in bis lecture upon the 
" Educational Value of the Study of Natural Histo- 
ry," ' states what he says is the method of all science, 
and it consists of simply the four steps just men- 
tioned. Newton declared that hypotheses are not 
to be regarded in experimental philosophy, but only 
observations and inductions. Prof. Tail say- : " Nat- 
ural philosophy is an experimental science. No 
a priori reasoning can conduct us demonstratively 
to a single physical truth." Comte will not allow 
introspection as a source of valid knowledge. " Pos- 
itive philosophy," according to him, " knows only 
sense-observatiun and the various inductions and de- 
ductions that may be made from it." Hippolyte 
Taine says, in reference to the general ideas which 
correspond to real qualities, that "they are the ob- 
ject of the experimental sciences, and their connec- 
tions are discovered by the inductive road." 2 Lewes 
similarly condemns intuition as having " no such 
safeguard" as sense has. "The method of verifica- 
tion, let us never forget," he says, " is the one grand 
characteristic distinguishing science from philoso- 
phy, modern inquiry from ancient inquiry. . . . The 
proof is w r ith us the great object of solicitude. We 
demand certainty ; and as the course of human evo- 

1 "Lay Sermons," p. 83. 
■ " On Intelligence," p. 409. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 79 

lution shows certainty to be attainable on no other 
method than the one followed by science, the con- 
demnation of metaphysics is inevitable." 1 And 
Prof. Tyndall, in his answer, in the Contemporary 
Review, to the critics of his prayer-gauge sugges- 
tion, after acknowledging that the theory of an 
over-ruling God who answers prayer is a legitimate 
theory, says, " but, without verification, a theoretic 
conception is a mere figment of the intellect." 

Now, no such division or contrast in the meth- 
ods of science and religion exists, I believe. If they 
be taken up successively, it will be seen, I think, 
that science, on the one hand, employs intuitive cog- 
nition and belief, authority and evidence, analogies, 
hypotheses, and various probable inferences, as well 
as religion; and, on the other hand, that religion, 
like science, grounds itself on observation, induction, 
and experimental verification. In short, science has 
its faith-basis, and faith its scientific foundation. 

I. Let us consider first the faith-basis of science. 
Take, to begin with, intuition. Here has always 
been one of the chief bulwarks of religion. It is 
from the immediate cognition of consciousness that 
religion affirms that it derives those spiritual phe- 
nomena, personality, free-will, devotional sensibility, 
and aspiration, and those great ideas, right and wrong, 
duty, responsibility, infinity, perfection, divinity, 

1 "Biographical History of Philosophy," pp. xxix., xxx., Intro- 
duction. In his "Problems of Life and Mind," passim, the same 
thing is said again and again. 



80 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

which constitute its foundations. And it is to the 
native convictions, universal in humanity, of a great 
Superhuman Spirit, and of a longer life for the hu- 
man soul than its life in the flesh — convictions at 
first perhaps dim and vague, possibly mere predis- 
positions to this view rather than that, but with ex- 
perience and intellectual development becoming 
clearer and more elevated — that religion refers as 
among the strongest proofs of its truth. 

Men of science, however, as we have already no- 
ticed, have entertained the greatest hostility to and 
scorn of intuition ; and have made it one of their 
chief objections to theology that it trusts so confid- 
ingly to it. Nevertheless, intuitive cognition and 
conviction is the only ground upon which science 
can rest a large part of its own fundamental doc- 
trines. Science, for example, accepts as the most 
trustworthy of all its departments the science of 
geometry. The truths established by it are indis- 
pensable to astronomy and to much of mechanics 
and physics. Yet, how is the truth of the funda- 
mental axioms of geometry known \ By sense-ob- 
servation? No skill and care would ever enable us 
to learn or prove experimentally any one geometrical 
proposition in the absolute way in which we know 
them all. Any finite amount of difference vastly 
less than what the sense could discern would falsify 
them. Yet the most delicately measured and con- 
structed figures are but rude approximations. They 
may seem equal where they are unequal, and regu- 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 81 

lar where they are irregular. In fact, there are in 
Nature no unextended points, no breadthless lines, 
no even planes, no exact circles and spheres, such as 
geometry deals with. Our diagrams might suggest 
such truths as that the sum of the angles of a trian- 
gle are equal to two right angles, and that the square 
on the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares 
on the other two sides. But they never could make 
it absolutely certain. Our exact and absolute knowl- 
edge of these truths is known, just as the axioms of 
morality are, by the mind's eye, by the direct inner 
apprehension. 

Or in any of the physical sciences, take up any 
so-called simple fact of observation, and see how, in- 
stead of the observer and his fact standing in direct 
relation, there is a perfect chain of successive intui- 
tions between them. 

A botanist, for example, relates to a scientific 
society that he saw last week the phenomenon of a 
perfectly green rose. But how, Mr. Botanist, do 
you know that you really observed such a thing? 
You saw it, you say, with your own eyes. But how 
do you know your eyes are to be trusted ? Perhaps 
you say that you smelt it or felt it, also. Still, let 
all the senses testify to it, how do you know they 
do not all deceive you ? It is possible. The best 
observer may make mistakes. 1 Every sense is liable 

1 Astronomers have long recognized, under " allowance for per- 
sonal equation," a certain inexactness in the observations of the best 
observers. 



82 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

to erroneous suggestion. 1 Every morning we wake 
from a crowd of fallacious perceptions, and our open- 
eyed moments are but waking dreams. Taine calls 
perception, in his work on "Intelligence," "essen- 
tially hallucination," so liable does be show it to be 
to deception, and so constantly does it refer sensa- 
tions to localities of tbe body where they do not 
really exist. 2 

1 Either an excitement of the nervous centre by hasheesh, opium, 
alcohol, or some intense idea, or an irritation of the nerve by con- 
cussion or local inflammation, is sufficient, as repeated experiments 
and observations have shown, to excite illusions of the senses. Such 
volumes as Maury's "Annales Medico-Psychologiques," Baillarger's 
" Des Hallucinations," Griesinger's " Traite des Malades Mentales," 
Abercrombie's " Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers," or. 
any standard " Pathology " or " Physiology " will illustrate this point. 

2 Taine, in Part II., Book I., Chapter I. of his " On Intelligence," 
shows by numerous instances cited from medical authorities, that 
while we assign every sensation which we experience to a certaiii 
place in our sensory members, foot, hand, tongue, etc., this is but an 
illusion. When a foot has been amputated, tinglings will be felt for 
many years, as if in the foot no longer there. Disease in the marrow 
excites tinglings in the extremities. When a new nose is formed 
by turning down a flap of skin from the forehead, and the nose is 
touched, it still seems for a long time to be the forehead that is 
touched. The sensation, though usually excited by some external 
object, may be excited by some molecular disturbance in the nerve, 
or by an image in the cerebral lobe. The affirmative judgment, 
or mental perception, none the less follows. We call it then a case 
of hallucination. But as in all cases the presence of this internal 
sensation is the immediate antecedent — as it is this iuternal phan- 
tom which is taken for an external object — all perceptions are 
really hallucinations. " Thus external perception," he says, " is an 
internal dream. . . . The hallucination which seems a monstrosity is 
the very fabric of our mental life." 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. Q$ 

" Of course," says the botanist, " I am liable to 
mistake a false perception for a true one, but what- 
ever is really perceived is infallible evidence for its 
own truth." But what is " really perceived ? " When 
the actual observation is rigorously analyzed we find 
that what is actually observed is not any external 
thing, but certain inward states of consciousness 
which we call sensations — sensations of color, smell, 
touch, etc. As Mill, 1 and Bain, and Taine, have 
shown in the field of philosophy, and Huxley, and 
Spencer, and Helmholtz, have reaffirmed as repre- 
sentatives of science, all that we really know of any 

1 John Stuart Mill, in his " Examination of Sir William Hamil- 
ton," Chapter XI., defines matter as a "permanent possibility of sen- 
sation," and will not believe in matter in any other sense. " I do 
not believe," he says, " that the real externality to us of any tiling, 
except other minds, is capable of proof." 

Prof. Helmholtz, iu " The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vi- 
sion," says : " What we directly apprehend is not the immediate action 
of the external exciting cause upon the ends of our nerves, but only 
the changed condition of the nervous fibres, which we call the state 
of excitation or functional activity." 

Prof. Huxley, in his address on Descartes, " Lay Sermons," 
p. 340, says, emphatically : " Matter and force are, so far as we can 
know, mere names for certain forms of consciousness. . . . Thus it 
is an indisputable truth that, what we call the material world, is only 
known to us under the forms of the ideal world." 

Herbert Spencer, " Principles of Psychology," p. 206, says, after 
an extended review of the relativity of feelings : " Thus we are 
brought to the conclusion that what we are conscious of as proper- 
ties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but sub- 
jective affections produced by objective agencies that are unknown 
and unknowable." 



84 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

object is nothing more nor less than our knowledge 
of certain forms of our own consciousness. There 
is no observation, strictly speaking, of any external 
object. We must either say, with Prof. Bain and 
his school, that " the belief in the existence of any 
portion of matter outside and independent of our 
consciousness is a most anomalous fiction," or else 
we must rest for its truth on an intuitive conviction 
of the veracity of the senses and the existence of an 
external world such as would give rise within us to 
our felt states of consciousness. 

Again, you say that you saw the rose last week. 
Still more intuitive beliefs must you, then, lean 
upon. For, how can you testify with certainty to 
what occurred last week ? You have no present sen- 
sation such as you describe. You have only in your 
present consciousness an image or recollection of it, 
and how do you know that this present image is a 
truthful copy of the past sensation ? There is no 
reason for it except that intuitive conviction of the # 
veracity of memory which John Stuart Mill himself 
is forced to acknowledge as an " ultimate belief." ' 
No past experience can prove this trustworthiness 
of memory. For it must in each case be taken for 
granted before you can have any cognizance what- 
ever of your past experience. 

But still another intuition belongs to the chain. 
You said that it was you who observed the rose last 

1 Mill's " Examination of Hamilton," p. 216, vol. i., American 
edition. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 85 

week. Yon remember it as an experience of your- 
self, and you imply, and the worth of your testimony 
depends upon the fact, that you who a week ago had 
a certain sensation, and now have it not, are yet one 
and the self-same person. Now, how do you know 
this personal identity ? Again, you must admit you 
know it only by an intuitive conviction. 

Thus, to be able to trust the simplest past obser- 
vation of a natural object, we must accept these four 
intuitive beliefs : 1. In the veracity of the senses ; 
2. In the reality of an external world; 3. In the 
veracity of memory ; 4. In our continuing personal 
identity. 

Among the fundamental principles on which sci- 
ence depends are the three doctrines of the inde- 
structibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and 
the persistence of force. Were it possible for mat- 
ter to become non-existent, or for motion or force to 
lapse into nothing, there would exist in science incal- 
culable elements, fatal to all positive knowledge or 
scientific interpretation of phenomena. What war- 
rant have we, then, for the truth of these great prin- 
ciples? Inductive experiment? This has certainly 
contributed much to establish it. Delicate tests with 
balance and retort have shown that when matter, 
motion, or force, seemed to disappear, they simply 
changed their form, place, or direction. Solids 
changed to gases, molar motion to molecular mo- 
tion, force of heat passed into magnetic or chemical 
force. Track the cunning Proteus into his new 



86 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

haunt, and you will find him there undiminished in 
quantity. This is what experience has suggested 
and approximately proved. But it has only done so 
approximately, never absolutely. It has shown that 
the more delicate were its means of measurement, 
the more closely it could follow every diverging 
motion or escaping matter, the more nearly equiva- 
lent was the quantity accounted for at the end with 
that with which the experiment began. But it has 
never proved this with any absolute exactness, nor for 
any larger field than the narrow circles which have 
been specially investigated. 1 Moreover, all through 
the so-called process of inductive proof, the truth to 
be demonstrated has been continually assumed, as 
Herbert Spencer has admirably shown in the fourth, 
fifth, and sixth chapters of his " First Principles." 
Whatever inductive experiments are made depend 
for their validity upon the continual assumption that 
the gravitation of the weights, or whatever unit of 
force is taken as the measure, remains constant, and 
of this, says Herbert Spencer (p. IS 7), no proof is 
assigned, nor can be assigned. " Nor is it only in 
then- concrete data," he continues, " that the reason- 
ings of terrestrial and celestial physics assume the 
persistence of force. They equally assume it in the 

1 Prof. Joseph Lovering, in his address as president, before the 
American Association at Hartford, 1874, says of the doctrine of the 
conservation of energy : " The most that physical science can assert 
is, that it possesses no evidence of the destructibility of matter or 
force." See also Lewes's " Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 87 

abstract principle with which they set out, and which 
they repeat in. justification of every step. The equal- 
ity of action and reaction is taken for granted from 
beginning to end of the argument ; and to assert 
that action and reaction are equal and opposite, is to 
assert that force is persistent. . . . Clearly, then, the 
persistence of force is an ultimate truth of which no 
inductive proof is possible." 

Or take the other great basic principle of sci- 
ence — the uniformity of Nature, embracing in that 
term both the uniformities of coexistence, or accom- 
panying qualities of things, and the uniformities of 
succession, or, as Mill calls it, the universality of 
causation. The validity of all induction, of all rea- 
sonings as to matter of fact in past, present, or fu- 
ture, depends upon the assumption of this uniform- 
ity of Nature. What scientific foundation, then, 
does science present for this universal basis of its 
knowledge ? It has none. John Stuart Mill, to be 
sure, sought to rest this general basis of induction 
upon induction itself, even upon an induction by 
simple enumeration. 1 But all his logical skill could 
not cover up the fact that he was thus proving the 
universal by a limited number of particulars, the 
greater by the less, the stronger by the weaker. It 
hardly needs to be pointed out that any particular 
experience, short of universal extent, cannot prove 

1 " I hold it to be itself an instance of induction, and induction by 
no means of the most obvious kind." — (" Logic," Book III., Chapter 

in., § i.) 



88 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

a universal law. However the evidence be manipu- 
lated, a general and absolute conclusion cannot be 
established upon a limited and uncertain premise. 
Experience can only testify as to what has been, not 
as to what will be. It can testify to what has come 
within its field, not as to what is outside. Although 
two events have accompanied each other a hundred 
thousand times under our observation, that is no 
proof that they will do so the next time. It is pos- 
sible that they may not. As one whose predispo- 
sitions all lead the other way says, "Water has 
quenched our thirst in the past ; by what assump- 
tion do we affirm that the same will happen in the 
future ? Experience does not teach this ; experience 
is only of what has actually been ; and, after never 
so many repetitions of a thing, there still remains 
the peril of venturing upon the untrodden land of 
future possibility. The fact, generally expressed as 
Nature's uniformity, is the guarantee, the ultimate 
major premise of all induction. ' What has been will 
be,' justifies the inference that water will assuage 
thirst in after-times. We can give no reason, no 
evidence, for this uniformity ; and therefore the 
course seems to be to adopt this as the finishing pos- 
tulate."— (Bain's " Logic," L, 273.) 

This is, indeed, the only logical course, to admit 
the belief in the uniformity of Nature as a funda- 
mental postulate, a primary intuition, an ultimate 
law of the mind. As Bain says in another work 
("Emotions and Will," second edition, page 537), 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 89 

" The foremost rank among the inductive tenden- 
cies involved in belief is to be assigned to the natu- 
ral trust that we have in the continuance of the 
present state of things." This natural trust is not, 
as Mr. Mill would have us believe, a mere generali- 
zation from experience. Experience may confirm it, 
but it exists before experience. It is what makes 
experience possible in the first place, and afterward 
shows it to be applicable. 

But it may be said that, though there is some- 
thing in this natural trust, this intuitive belief, that 
precedes the experience of the individual, it does not 
precede the experience of the race ; that it is, in fact, 
simply the experience of our ancestors, organized 
within us. This is what Herbert Spencer and Lewes 
urge. But, should this be established or admitted, it 
would give no sufficient explanation to our present 
question. The question here is, not about the origin 
of our belief, but about its logical validity. Grant 
that the experience which testifies is not merely that 
of the individual, but that of the whole human race 
from its creation, or, if you please, that of the still 
longer line of man's ancestry from the lowest living 
creature up to the humanity of to-day, this is still 
far from sufficient to afford logical validity to belief 
in universal uniformity. After even this extension 
back through all past generations is given to experi- 
ence, the portion of time and space which it can bear 
witness to is but a little corner in the great field of 
Nature, and the induction of the premise still falls 



90 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

immensely short of the universality which the con- 
clusion demands. Unless Science acknowledges that 
its fundamental principle has no logical justification, 
it must rest it on the intuitive conviction or natural 
faith of men in it, and recognize such natural faith 
as an ultimate foundation, sufficient as its own evi- 
dence, allowing nothing lower and needing nothing 
stronger beneath. 1 

2. Authority and evidence. Every religion leans 
upon these more or less. Every religion has its 
founder, prophet, or teacher, whose word it rev- 
erences. Before the disciple sees the truth of his 
master's teaching by his own mental sight or life- 
experience, he accepts it as true ; presuming that it 
is true because he recognizes in his master a knowl- 
edge and a nature superior to his own. The precious 
utterances of such masters are collected in books, 
which soon become sacred. Some Holy Scripture, 
Bible, Koran, or Veda, is an heirloom in every form 
of faith. Then comes the need of evidence to prove 



1 The following passage from Huxley's address on Descartes's " Dis- 
course," " La) 7 Sermons," p. 32*7, might be quoted in confirmation of 
the points so far made : "Strictly speaking, the existence of a ' self 
and of a 'not-self are hypotheses by which we account for the facts 
of consciousness. They stand upon the same footing as the belief in 
the general trustworthiness of memory and in the general constancy 
of the order of Nature, as hypothetical assumptions which cannot be 
proved or known with the highest degree of certainly which is given 
by immediate consciousness." Although we shoald prefer the name 
"intuitive beliefs" to "hypothetical assumptions," yet the argu- 
ment for the failh-hdiSis of science is the same. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. l 9X 

the important questions of its authenticity and gen- 
uineness. The longer a form of faith endures, and 
the farther away it gets from its original fountain, 
the larger place in it do these two elements natural- 
ly take. In Christianity, especially, great stress has 
been laid upon them. With many it has been an 
undue stress, that neglected the internal evidence 
that would still remain for Christianity though all 
external evidence were swept away. Nevertheless, 
there is a natural and proper place for authority and 
evidence among the proofs of the Christian religion. 
And in science, too, there is a similar need and 
use of these two media of proof and personal con- 
viction. All beginners in science, and the great 
mass of common people, have to lean upon scien- 
tific authorities. 1 Some few scientific facts and laws 
they can observe or form for themselves. But for 
all the more difficult matter they must trust some 
one or ones whom they believe to possess competent 
knowledge. For example, even such a universally- 
believed fact as the revolution of the earth around 
the sun — there is not one man in ten thousand who 
has mastered personally the proof of it, or who is 
able to demonstrate it to any man who should de- 

1 " Authority is the evidence on which the mass of mankind be- 
lieve every thing which they are said to know, except facts of which 
their own senses have taken cognizance. It is the evidence on which 
even the wisest receive all those truths of science or facts in history 
or in life, of which they have not personally examined the proofs." — 
(John Stuart Mill, " Three Essays on Religion," p. 78. See also 
Le Conte, " Religion and Science," p. 236.) 



92 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

clare himself a believer in the old Ptolemaic system. 
The other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety- 
nine accept it as a fact through their faith in a few 
astronomers' assertions. 

Prof. Ilenfrey, in his paper upon the " Study 
of Botairy," ' takes pains to deny that it is in- 
dispensable for every prosecutor of natural history 
to verify or repeat the propositions of the abstract 
science; "in fact," he says, " the enunciation and 
demonstration of them, which form the great busi- 
ness of the philosophical botanist, would scarcely 
come within the space of possibility for the gener- 
ality of mankind busied with other matters." This 
is equally true of almost every other branch of sci- 
ence. If the student of physical knowledge should 
accept nothing on authority, he would spend his life 
in retracing a few hand-breadths of early investiga- 
tion. Progress is made in science, as everywhere 
else, by accepting in faith the results of the past, 
and making them a platform on which to mount 
higher. Not only scientific pupils must do this, but 
all beneath the very great masters; and even these 
greatest masters must do so outside of their own 
specialties. Even among those who stand high in 
scientific fame, how many, for instance, who accept 
and iise the results of Laplace's " Mccanique Ce- 
leste," Faraday's electrical discoveries, Champollion's 
and Bunsen's Egyptian discoveries, Iiuwlinson's and 
Oppert's decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, 

1 Youuians's " Culture demauded by Modem Life," p. 105. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 93 

or William Thomson's measurement of the size of 
molecules, have ever themselves followed through 
and verified the steps by which those results were 
reached ? 

Nor can science progress without a similar trust 
in and use of evidence. In chemistry, to be sure, 
most facts can be verified at any time by experiment. 
But even here it is not more than once or twice 
that a chemist will evaporate forty tons of mineral 
water, as Prof. Bunsen did, to show in it a little 
caesium. Chemists, for the most part, are content 
to take Bunsen's testimony for it. In astronomy, 
the eternal stars generally allow instant verification 
of observation at any time. But for transient and 
exceptional facts, the testimony of a few, perhaps of 
a single observer, has to be relied upon. And it is 
relied upon, though the facts often are in apparent 
contradiction to the usual order of Nature. When 
Tycho Brahe relates that he one night saw a star 
flash forth in great brilliancy in the constellation of 
Cassiopeia ; or Prof. Young describes immense erup- 
tions upon the surface of the sun as witnessed by 
him ; or some other observer at a remote point of 
the earth tells of an eclipse seen only there, science 
confidently accepts their evidence. So, for the dates 
of ancient eclipses and planetary conjunctions, the 
occurrence of meteoric showers and the appearances 
of comets in former times, astronomers rely upon an- 
cient records whose authenticity and genuineness are, 
to say the least, no more sure than those of the first 



94 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

three gospels or the Pauline Epistles. This method 
of comparing present observations with former ones 
is a frequent one with astronomers, and their main 
resource in determining exactly the length of the day, 
the year, and other natural constants. Hipparchus 
made the first clear application of it, it is said, when 
he compared his own observations with those of Aris- 
tarchus, made one hundred and forty -five years pre- 
viously. Laplace, in explaining the long inecmality 
in the motions of Jupiter and Saturn, was nm h as- 
sisted by a conjunction of these planets observed by 
Ibyn Jounis, at Cairo, toward the close of the elev- 
enth century. Poisson, by making use of an ancient 
eclipse recorded by the Chaldeans, was supposed to 
have proved that the sidereal day had not altered 
one ten-millionth part in twenty-five hundred years. 
Similar calculations were made by Laplace. It is 
now concluded, however, that the sidereal day is 
longer by one part in two million seven hundred 
thousand than in 720 b. c. All these calculations, 
of course, assume the trustworthiness of ancient 
records. 

In geology, botany, zoology, also, the man who 
will believe nothing but what he has seen with his 
own eyes will learn very little. No one observer 
can personally observe a thousandth part of the phe- 
nomena which constitute the accepted stock of scien- 
tific knowledge. At most, he can but scan a hortus 
siccus, or museums of minerals, shells, skeletons, and 
stuffed specimens. For the original locality and po- 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 95 

sitoion of strata, for the living appearance, habits, and 
homes of the various species, and for the whole ac- 
count of the fauna and flora of remote countries not 
yet illustrated by accessible specimens, the man of 
science must depend upon the reports of travelers, 
often no more in number than, nor so close in agree- 
ment as, the Four Evangelists. They bring back 
reports of glass sponges, and animals with eyes 
brought up from the rayless and plantless depths of 
the sea, as in the recent dredging exjDeditions. They 
give us accounts of fossil horses, no bigger than a fox ; 
of veritable dragons, the winged-fingered pterodac- 
tyles, twenty-five feet from tip to tip ; of birds with 
well-developed teeth in both jaws, and of fish with 
legs ; of sea-serpents, the sauroid reptiles of the Cre- 
taceous period, over seventy feet in length — as Prof. 
Marsh's expeditions have done. They tell us of a 
race of dwarfs and other marvels, as Schweinfurth 
has done ; they recount every day new wonder after 
wonder, just as much opposed to general experience 
as any thing in the doctrines and accounts of Chris- 
tianity, and the scientific world receives their narra- 
tives with full credence. Certainly, scientific men 
should be the last to refuse as credible the testimony 
of honest eye-witnesses simply because their narra- 
tives contain some marvelous details. 

3. Analogy, hypothesis, and various kinds of 
merely probable inference. 

Religion, it is true, often uses these in support 
of the doctrines it advances. It employs the argu- 



96 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

nient from analogy, for example, in proof of the fu- 
ture life of the soul. Every atom of matter, it says, 
is believed by Science to be absolutely indestructi- 
ble. So also is every smallest quantity of force. If 
these other units, if all the rest of the force in the 
universe is thus able to survive the shocks of change, 
if all else is thus carefully guarded by Nature from 
destruction, is it likely that the intelligent soul, the 
conscious writ, the spiritual force which is the most 
exalted of all earthly things, perishes at the end of 
this short life ? 

Again, every order of organized sentient being 
below man has a sphere of development and action 
commensurate with its capacities. Unless man be 
a solitary exception to the general order, he must 
also have such a sphere. But it is evident that in 
this hand-breadth of earth and earthly life his vast 
capacities and desires cannot fulfill themselves. If 
his chances of development are like those of his 
fellow-creatures, he must have an existence here- 
after to give the opportunities not supplied here. 

Now, whether these analogies be considered as 
supplying logical proof or not, they are just such as 
Science uses. 

Science asserts with entire confidence the exist- 
ence of this and that chemical element in the heav- 
enly bodies, iron and sodium in the atmosphere of 
the sun, Sirius, and other stars ; blazing hydrogen 
gas in the dumb-bell nebula and other irresolvable 
nebulae. II ow does it know any one of these facts, 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. QJ 

say the last \ Simply by the fact that objects on the 
earth presenting the same spectroscopic lines are 
hydrogen. As the nebula presents these lines, it is 
inferred to be of the same constitution in other re- 
spects also. It is by a like analogical argument that 
the white spots at the poles of Mars are believed by 
scientific men to be snow, that the fossil skeletons 
found in the earth are held to have once belonged to 
living animals, and that the likenesses of composition 
and growth which language and geological strata 
exhibit, teach us their history and origin. 1 

1 la Dr. W. B. Carpenter's " Inaugural Address before the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science," at Brighton, 1872, 
I have, since writing the above, found the following confirmatory pas- 
sage : " Mr. Lockyer speaks as confidently of the sun's chromosphere, 
of incandescent hydrogen, and of the local outbursts which cause it 
to send forth projections tens of thousands of miles high, as if he 
had been able to capture a flask of this gas, and had generated water 
by causing it to unite with oxygen. Yet this confidence is entirely 
based on the assumption that a certain line which is seen in the 
spectrum of a hydrogen-flame, means hydrogen also when seen in the 
spectrum of the sun's chromosphere ; and high as is the probability 
of that assumption, it cannot be regarded as a demonstrated certain- 
ty, since it is by no means inconceivable that the same line might be 
produced by some other substance at present unknown." 

From Prof. Whitney we extract the following in regard to the 
use of analogy in philology : " So far back as we can trace the his- 
tory of language, the forces which have been efficient in producing 
its changes and the general outline of their modes of operation, have 
been the same, and we are justified in concluding — we are even com- 
pelled to infer — that they have been the same from the outset. There 
is no way of investigating the first hidden steps of any continuous 
historical process, except by carefully studying the later recorded 
steps and cautiously applying the analogies thence deduced. So the 
5 



98 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

Of course, the knowledge derived in this way, 
whether by science or religion, is but inferential, 
and, moreover, merely probable. He must be very 
ignorant of Science who reproaches Religion with 
the employment of inference or merely probable ar- 
guments, as if she alone were a sinner, or guilty 
above her physical sister. Science is as much the 
daughter of reason as of the senses. If the first 
step in induction is observation, the second is al- 
ways what inference the observations justify. It is 
from this point of view that Herbert Spencer gives 
as one definition of science, " an extension of the 
perceptions by means of reasoning" ("Recent Dis- 
cussions,' 1 p. 1G0). Observed facts do not deserve the 
name of science until they have been arranged by 
the magnet of some idea and marshaled in the on- 
ward column of some argument. " Isolated facts 
and experiments," says Helmholtz, in his lecture 
upon the "Aim and Progress of Physical Science" 
(" Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects," p. 369), 
"have in themselves no value, however great their 
number may be. They only become valuable in a 

geologist studies the forces which are now altering by slow degrees 
the form and aspect of the earth's crust, wearing down the rocks 
here, depositing beds of sand and pebbles there, pouring out floods 
of lava over certain regions, raising or lowering the line of coast 
along certain seas ; and he applies the result of his observations 
with confidence to the explanation of phenomena dating from a time 
to which men's imaginations, even, can hardly reach. The legiti- 
macy of the analogical reasoning is not less undeniable in the one 
case than in the other." — (Whitney's " Language and the Study of 
Language," p. 253.) 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 99 

theoretical or practical point of view, when they 
make us acquainted with the law of a series of uni- 
formly-recurring phenomena ; it may be, only give a 
negative result, showing an incompleteness in our 
knowledge of such a law, till then held to be per- 
fect. ... To find the law by which they are regu- 
lated is to understand phenomena.'' 

Science, then, supplies no valuable knowledge 
till its crude facts are crystallized by inferences, and 
built up into conclusions. And it is rare, in physical 
investigations, that these conclusions are more than 
probable. There are some cases, of course, where 
our investigation may be made exhaustive. Such 
are the eases where our inquiry is limited to a small 
class, a definite portion of matter, a moderate extent 
of time or area of space. But in almost all cases, 
not alone in analogical reasoning, but in the best 
inductions, in all those which much advance knowl- 
edge, our conclusions must pass beyond the narrow 
confines of our data. " In natural history," says 
Prof. Henfrey, 1 " it is rarely in our power to ascer- 
tain all the particulars requisite for any given induc- 
tion ; it is scarcely ever possible to use this demon- 
strative induction. "We are continually obliged to 
derive a general consequence from a portion of the 
particular cases which it ought to rest upon, and in 
such cases we anticipate the agreement of the rest, 
basing the hypothesis upon analogy. In this way 

1 "The Study of Botany," Youmans's "Culture demanded by 
Modern Life." 



100 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

we arrive, not at absolute certainties, but at great 
probabilities. 1 ' Similarly says Prof. Youmans, now 
the editor of The Popular Science Monthly, speak- 
ing of the study of biology/ " Complete or demon- 
strative induction being impossible, we are com- 
pelled to form conclusions from only a part of the 
facts involved, and to anticipate the agreement of 
the rest.". So, also, says Prof. De Morgan, speak- 
ing of induction : " Since it is practically impossible 
to examine all particulars, the statement of a univer- 
sal from its particulars is only probable, unless it 
should happen that we can detect some law connect- 
ing the instances by which the result when obtained 
as to a certain number may be inferred as to the rest. 
. . . This induction by connection is common enough 
in mathematics, but can hardly occur in any other 
kind of knowledge." 

Whenever we get a clear idea of the vast num- 
bers of permutations and combinations which may 
be possible with no very great number of various 
agents or conditions, we learn how hopeless it would 
be to attempt to treat Nature in detail, and make ex- 
haustive inductions. It has been recommended, for 
example, that a systematic examination of all alloys 
of metals should be carried out, proceeding from the 
most simple binary compounds to the more compli- 
cated ternary and quaternary ones. But if only 
thirty of the known metals were operated upon, the 
number of binary alloys, it is calculated, would be 

1 " Culture demanded by Modern Life," p. 34. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 10 1 

435, of ternary alloys -±,060, of quaternary 27,405, 
without paying any regard to the varying propor- 
tions of the metals. If we varied all the ternary al- 
loys by quantities not less than one per cent., the num- 
ber of these alloys only would be over 11,000,000. 
So also in regard to the possible chemical combina- 
tions. Taking the number of elements at sixty-one, 
the number of compounds containing different se- 
lections of four elements each would be more than 
half a million. As the same elements often com- 
bine in different proportions, it would hardly be pos- 
sible to assign any limit to the possible compounds 
that chemistry can furnish. Under such circum- 
stances, it is inevitable that induction should never 
give more than incomplete knowledge. 1 

In regard to political science, John Stuart Mill, 
in his inaugural address, as Rector of the University 
of St. Andrew's, said : " It is evident, to whoever 
comes to the study from that of the experimental 
sciences, that no political conclusions of any value 
for practice can be arrived at by direct experience. 
Such specific experience as we can have serves only 
to verify, and even that insufficiently, the conclu- 
sions of reasoning. . . . All true political science is, 
in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced 
from the tendencies of things, tendencies known 
either through our general experience of human na- 
ture, or as the result of an analysis of the course of 
history considered as a progressive evolution." 
1 Jevons, vol. i., p. 218. 



102 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

The same is true of the other sciences, and espe- 
cially of the great natural laws. The law of gravi- 
ity, for example, has never been proved by any ex- 
haustive induction. Only a small portion of terres- 
trial matter, and a few of the myriad stars of heaven, 
have been tested as conforming to it. The first law 
of motion that " every body continues in its state of 
rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except 
in so far as it may be compelled by impressed forces 
to change that state," can never be proved by induc- 
tion. That a real body should move uniformly in a 
straight line, is contrary to all observation. It not 
only has never been seen, but can never be seen. 
As Lewes says, " No such phenomenon could pre- 
sent itself in a universe like ours, where motion is 
always accelerated or retarded, and always more or 
less divergent from a straight line." 

The same is true of the conservation of energy. 
All the inductive proof that can be given of it is 
only approximative. There is always a certain dis- 
crepance between the sum of force we start with in 
one form, such as heat, and the sum we recover in 
another form, such as motion. This discrepance, in 
careful experiments, may be very slight. By still 
greater care it may be made so infinitesimal that in 
practice it maybe disregarded. But the discrepance 
is always there, and, however close we may approach 
to an absolute equivalence, we can never attain it. 
As Jevons says, 1 " The most that we can do by experi- 

1 Vol. ii., p. 83. 



TEE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 103 

inent is, to show that the energy entering into any ex- 
perimental combination is almost exactly equal to 
what comes out of it, and the more nearly so, the 
more exactly we perform all the measurements. Ab- 
solute equality is always a matter of assumption." 
Long before we reach that point, the thread we are 
tracing grows so fine as no longer to be held by our 
fingers. Should some minute part of it vanish, we 
could not detect the loss. The cogency granted to 
the scientific proof of either the first law of motion, 
or the conservation of energy, or the indestructibility 
of matter or force, depends upon the experience that, 
the farther we extend our observation, the more deli- 
cate we make our tests, and exclude disturbing con- 
ditions, the nearer we come to the realization of the 
law. 1 It is but the same kind of approximative evi- 
dence which religion brings to show the benevolence 
and providence of God. As we understand Nature 
and human events more and more thoroughly, we 
find more and more that every thing is good. 

The fact is, as Stanley Jevons says, 2 " not one of 
the inductive truths which men have established, or 
think they have established, is really safe from ex- 
ception or reversal. . . . Euler expresses no more than 
the truth when he says that it would be impossible 
to fix on any one thing really existing of which we 
could have so perfect a knowledge as to put us be- 
yond the reach of mistake.' 1 ' Though we have ob- 

1 Jevons, vol. ii., p. 271. 

2 "Principles of Science," vol. L, p. 274. 



104 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

served ten thousand swans to be white, it does not fol- 
low but what the next swan may be black. Though 
we have observed flame to burn a hundred million 
times, it does not follow but what the next time it 
may not- — the law ruling it being a change-bearing 
one, such as Babbage made in one of his calculating- 
machines, or some unsuspected cause being in exist- 
ence which may produce a different effect. 1 " The 

1 Few, probably, are aware how large a number of examples of 
these change-bearing laws and exceptions to what has been supposed 
universal uniformities, have been disclosed by recent science. 

The expansion of solids and liquids by heat, and their contraction 
by cold, is a law so general and intimately connected with the very 
theory of heat, that it would seem as if a real anomaly to it ought 
not to be expected. Indeed, for a long time no exception was ob- 
server!. But modern researches have disclosed the fact that stretched 
India-rubber and a few other solids contract, instead of expanding, 
by heat, and that water, though conforming to the usual law from 
212° Fahr. down to 39^-°, then changes, and from 30.V 3 to its freezing- 
point expands with the increase of cold. 

Again, it is one of the most important and rigorous laws of chem- 
istry that equal volumes of gases exactly correspond to equivalent 
weights of the substances. Unfortunately, phosphorus and arsenic 
give vapors exactly twice as dense as they should do by analogy, and 
mercury and cadmium diverge in the other direction, giving vapors 
half as dense as we should expect. Physicists assert again, as an 
absolutely universal law, that in liquefaction heat is absorbed, yet 
sulphur is, at least, an apparent exception. Until a recent discover j 
of Mr. Hermann Smith, all our knowledge of rods and strings, plates 
and membranes, had agreed in the law of isoehronism — that, however 
the amplitude may vary, the times of vibration will be the same. 
But in the so-called " air-reed," into which the stream of air is mould- 
ed in the embouchure of an organ-pipe, an absolute reversal of this 
is exhibited. (See Nature, 1874, vol. x., p. 161.) 

A multitude of further similar cases might be quoted. The num- 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 105 

conclusions of scientific inference," to quote Jevons 
again, 1 " appear to be always of an hypothetical and 
purely provisional nature. The best-calculated re- 
sults which it can give are never absolute probabili- 
ties ; they are purely relative to the extent of our 
information. It seems to be impossible for us to 
judge how far our experience gives us adequate 
information of the universe as a whole, and of all 
the forces and phenomena which can have place 
therein." 2 

To the same effect I may quote, from the oppo- 
site side of the philosophical camp, the declarations 
of Taine and Lewes. Speaking of the laws of real 
things gained by induction, Taine says : " However 
well-established and verified one of these laws may 
be, if we wish to apply it outside of the little circle 
of space and short fragment of duration to which 
our observations are limited, it becomes probable 
only. It is not absolutely certain that the law of 
gravitation continues to hold good beyond the far- 
thest nebulae of Herschel. It is not at all certain 
that, in the sun, oxygen and hydrogen preserve the 



ber of them, in fact, is so great, that Jevons declares that " it would 
be easy to point out an almost infinite number of other unexplained 
anomalies." — (" Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 341.) 

1 "Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 465. 

2 The passages quoted from Jevons are but two out of a dozen 
similar passages that might be quoted, in which the merely probable 
nature of scientific conclusions is emphatically affirmed. (See vol. i., 
pp. 3, 265, 271, 2*75 ; vol. ii., pp. 429, 432, 443, 459.) 



106 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

chemical affinity which we find they have here with 
us." » 

"In this assumption," says Lewes, "of an iden- 
tity amid diversity, this inference, that what has 
been found to coexist with certain characters will he 
found elsewhere to coexist with similar characters, 
lies the whole reach of induction. . . . Consequent- 
ly, induction can never be more than a more or less 
probable guess. It is not knowledge till it ceases to 
be inductive by the verification of each of its applied 
inferences." 2 

The Gordian knots of existence not allowing 
themselves thus to be untied by any complete induc- 
tions, they must be severed in some more summary 
way. Religion does so by its grand hypotheses of 
God and soul — for they are in a certain sense hy- 
potheses — transcending at first, nay, transcending 
forever, the sweep of any possible induction. For 
thus resorting to hypotheses Religion has always been 
reproached, and it has had commended to it the Ba- 
conian method of laborious accumulation of facts, 
and careful and orderly abstraction from them of 
general axioms or laws. It has been reminded of 
Newton's warning against " anticipations." It has 
been admonished to recall the similar scholium of 
the great philosopher, "Whatever is not deduced 
from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis, 

I "On Intelligence," p. 426. 

II G. H. Lewes's " Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p. 159. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 107 

and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, 
have no place in experimental philosophy." But, in 
point of fact, it is just this procedure of anticipating 
Nature, of framing hypotheses, which has yielded 
all the more lofty and successful results of science. 
" Those who have most advanced the natural science 
since Bacon's day," says Prof. Henfrey, "have de- 
parted from the rigorous method of induction, and 
by this alone rendered possible the rapid progress 
of the sciences." To the same effect, says Prof. 
Jevons, 1 "whether we look to Galileo and Gilbert, 
his contemporaries, or to Newton and Descartes, his 
successors, we find that discovery was achieved by 
the exactly opposite method to that advanced by 
Bacon." In spite of Newton's condemnation of 
hypotheses, " the greater part of his ' Principia,' " 
says Prof. Jevons, "is purely hypothetical." His 
practice is the most splendid vindication of their 
use. Huyghens's brilliant achievements were gained 
by the same means. 

The history of the inductive sciences, to quote 
the words of Whewell, " is the rise of theories out 
of facts and the passing of theories into facts." La- 
place's, Darwin's, Spencer's great scientific achieve- 
ments are all hypotheses. 2 Geology, paleontology, 
archaeology, are all built up by hypotheses. These 
sciences are but the interpretations we have guessed 

1 Fortnightly Review, l%1%, p. 780. 

2 " Tyndall's Fragments of Science," pp. 155-159. 



108 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

for a few of Nature's infinite hieroglyphics. " Nei- 
ther induction nor deduction," Auguste Comte him- 
self has said, " would enable us to understand even the 
simplest phenomena, if we did not often commence 
by anticipation on the results ; " and in his discourse 
delivered before the British Association in Liver- 
pool, in 1870, Prof. Tyndall has urged upon his sci- 
entific comrades the importance of the imagination 
as the mightiest instrument of physical investiga- 
tion, and indicates as the organ that is finally to 
solve the ultimate problems of physics, " spiritual 
insight." " Bounded and conditioned by cooperant 
reason," says Tyndall, "imagination becomes the 
mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. 
Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling 
moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination. 
When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate 
particles of matter between his compass-points, and 
to apply to them a scale of millimetres, he is power- 
fully aided by this faculty. And in much that has 
been recently said about protoplasm and life, we 
have the outgoings of the imagination guided and 
controlled by the known analogies of science. In 
fact, without this power, our knowledge of Nature 
would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and se- 
quences. We should still believe in the succession of 
day and night, of summer and winter ; but the soul 
of Force would be dislodged from our universe ; 
causal relations would disappear, and with them that 
science which is now building the parts of Nature 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 109 

into an organic whole." 1 It needs hardly to be re- 
marked, that hypotheses, imagination, insight, are 
but secular names for the action and faculty which, 
under the standard of Religion, are so much scoffed 
at as " faith." 

4. But scientific faith, it will be said, legitimates 
itself by the test of verification. Religious faith 
does not. It is the bringing of its doctrines, by 
whatever argument supported, whether by intuition, 
authority, evidence, analogy, or hypotheses, square- 
ly up to the test of verification as a final and deci- 
sive test, that justifies these methods in the hands of 
Science. And it is the disuse of this test by Religion 
that in her hands renders them suspicious. Now, on 
the one hand, Religion, as I shall show Further on, is 
able to confirm its fundamental propositions by veri- 
fications similar to those employed by Science. On 
the other hand, the doctrines of science, even those 

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 130. 

The editor of The Popular Science Monthly, for March, 18*75, 
in answer to a criticism upon Tyndall, for this use of mental pictur- 
ing in science, says : " Our writer says that ' Science starts with 
observation and experiment ; ' but the real starting-point is farther 
back. A mental representation must be made before it can be 
verified. A certain state of things is conceived or put together in 
thought, and is called an hypothesis ; and then observation and ex- 
periment are appealed to, to test the correctness of the representation, 
the truthfulness of the mental picture. Science is not merely seeing 
with the eye, or fumbling with instruments. Any blockhead can do 
these ; but it is to reconstruct Nature in thought. ... To do this 
the imagination or image-forming faculty comes into incessant play." 
(p. 621.) 



HO PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

generally accepted, are in many cases destitute of 
any proper verification. 

For instance : The fundamental law in pneu- 
matics, that, where gases are allowed to mix, every 
gas is in a constant state of diffusion of every part 
into every part, cannot be verified by observation ; 
for in very many if not most cases the portions of 
gases, or the different gases, cannot be followed 
and identified. One atom of oxygen, for example, 
is practically undistinguishable from another atom. 
Only by keeping a certain volume of gas safely 
inclosed in a bottle can we assure ourselves of its 
identity. Allow it to mix with other oxygen, and 
we have lost all power of identification. 

The results of celestial spectroscopy, based as we 
have seen them to be on analogy, allow no means of 
verification. For the assumptions underlying them 
— that substances on celestial bodies vibrate exactly 
as substances on the earth, and that some different 
substance, either a known or an unknown one, cannot 
have synchronous vibrations with the substance ob- 
served here to have these vibrations — can never be 
established. Should either assumption be reasona- 
bly suspected to be erroneous, as the last already has 
been by Prof. Young, from certain phenomena, the 
whole superstructure would fall with it. 

Social science, as John Stuart Mill has pointed 
out, 1 is incapable of direct verification. The nebular 
and the development hypotheses, and all the accounts 
1 "System of Logic," Book VI., Chapter IX., Sec. 6. 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. \\\ 

of the past history of the universe, in the astronomi- 
cal, geological, or biological departments} are incapa- 
ble of direct verification. 1 None of these events have 

1 In TyndalTs " Belfast Address," he speaks of the provability 
of the doctrine of evolution as follows : " The strength of the doc- 
trine of evolution consists, not in an experimental demonstration (for 
the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof), but in its gen- 
eral harmony with the method of Nature as hitherto known." 

George H. Lewes speaks of the two hypotheses of the origin of 
life, that of creation and that of natural selection, as follows : " Both 
these hypotheses of origin must always remain hypotheses. Knowl- 
edge of what things are under observed conditions may be absolute ; 
it can never lead to more than hypothetical statements of what things 
were under other conditions ; and since it is manifestly impossible 
that we should ever know what were the exact conditions under 
which organic life emerged, we can do no more than guess at ori- 
gins." — (" Problems of Life and Mind," vol. ii., p. *76.) 

Still more emphatic is the testimony of Prof. Huxley. Speaking 
of the animal pedigree assigned to man by Darwin and Haeckel, he 
says : " It need hardly be said that, in dealing with such a problem 
as this, Science rapidly passes beyond the bounds of positive, verifi- 
able fact, and enters those of more or less justifiable speculation. But 
there are very few scientific problems, even of those which have been 
and are being most successfully solved, which have been or can be 
approached in any other way. 

" Our views respecting the nature of the planets, of the sun and 
stars, are speculations which are not and cannot be directly verified ; 
that great instrument of research, the atomic hypothesis, is a specu- 
lation which cannot be directly verified ; the statement that an ex- 
tinct animal, of which we know only the skeleton, and never can know 
any more, had a heart and lungs, and gave birth to young which were 
developed in such and such a fashion, may be one which admits of 
no reasonable doubt, but it is an unverifiable hypothesis. I may be 
as sure as I can be of any thing that I had a thought, yesterday morn- 
ing, which I took care neither to utter nor to write down, but my con- 
viction is an utterly unverifiable hypothesis. So that unverified and 



112 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ever been tested by observation, or can ever hence- 
forth be tested by observation. What physicist stood 
by and saw the glowing gas condense into snn and 
planets'* What savant watched the annnlosa de- 
velop the primordial vertebrate; the amphibia the 
mammal ; the mammal the man ( What man of to- 
day looked on the dry land uniting England with 
France, or the seas that once covered Wales, the 
Netherlands, or the larger part of Russia? What 
scientific enchanter holds the wand that can roll 
back the wheel of Time to those long-passed epochs? 
or what experimenter so mighty as to be able 
to reproduce all those vanished conditions of the 
universe which gave birth to its primeval phe- 
nomena ? The only verification possible in any of 
these great departments is to show that the cause 
assigned, according to present laws of causation, 
would account for the phenomena. Not that they 
did cause them, nor that the laws of causation have 
come down unchanged, nor even that no other cause 
could have produced the given effects. The same is 
true of those important scientific theories, the atomic 
constitution of chemical substances and the ether- 
waves 1 which are regarded universally as the vehicle 

even unverifiable hypotheses may be great aids to the progress of 
knowledge, may have a right to be believed with a high uegrec of as- 
surance." (See article, " Darwin and Haeckel," p. 596, Popular Sci- 
ence Monthly, March, 18*75.) 

1 " The domain in which this motion of light is carried on," says 
Tyndall, " lies entirely beyond the reach of our senses. The waves 
of light require a medium for their formation and propagation, but 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. H3 

of light. JSTo verification by any kind of observa- 
tion is possible.' For the most powerful microscope 
has never discerned a molecule or an atom. They 
are at least a thousand times smaller, according to 
Thomson's calculations, than any particle which the 
microscope can discern. They are as pure assump- 
tions as the vortices of Descartes, or the emitted cor- 
puscles of Newton's theory of light. All the verifi- 
cation that can be given is to show, in the phrase 
which Tyndall so frequently uses, in his paper on 
the "Scientific Imagination," that the phenomena 
occur as if there were such substrata. There is 
nothing to prove that they are actually there, or 
that some other better explanation may not be dis- 
covered and banish them, as the belief in emitted 
corpuscles and imponderable fluids has already been 
dismissed. 

So, again, the truths of geometry, the doctrines 
of the indestructibility of matter and force, and the 
uniformity of Nature, all laws claiming universality 
and absoluteness, as it was before shown that they 
could not be proved by observation, so neither can 
they be verified by experience, that is, in their uni- 
versality and absoluteness. Their only verification 
is approximative and probable. 

we cannot see, or feel, or taste, or smell this medium." — (Tyndall'a 
"Fragments of Science," p. 214.) 

1 " It is not pretended that the existence of atoms has been or can 
be proved or disproved." — (Presidential Address of Prof. Lovering 
before the American Association at Hartford, 1874.) 



114 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

Thus is it shown by examination that Science, 
when she would grasp any of the wider laws and 
deeper secrets of Nature, must and does employ the 
very methods for which Religion is rejected, and is 
open to the same objections. If the one is not to be 
rejected or doubted because of these, why is the 
other? If the physicist may rely upon man's natu- 
ral faith in an external reality, and in the practical 
veracity of his physical senses., why may not the 
spiritualist rely upon the same natural faith of man- 
kind, when it declares the inward reality of the soul 
and the veracity of moral and spiritual discernment? 
If the scientific world accept the belief in the inde- 
structibility of force as an ultimate belief, not to be 
questioned, why may not the religious. world legiti- 
mately receive the natural belief of man in the im- 
mortality of the soul as a similar ultimate belief, not 
to be distrusted ? If the student of Nature custom- 
arily receives the word of a Newton, a Laplace, or 
a Tyndall, as presumably to be trusted, even when 
declaring that which he cannot fully understand, 
why may not the Christian disciple accept the au- 
thority of a superior spiritual discerner, like Jesus 
Christ, with a similar confidence ? If the optician 
may lawfully deduce from the phenomena of light, 
chat he studies, the hypothesis of an invisible, infi- 
nite ether, why may not the theist, with equal justi- 
fication, infer from the kosmic phenomena, that he 
studies, the hypothesis of an invisible, infinite Cre- 
ator and Guardian ; and if the one hypothesis is not 



THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE. \\§ 

to be declared a "mere figment of the scientific fan- 
cy " * because it cannot be directly verified by sense- 
perception, why is the other to be regarded as a fig- 
ment of the religious imagination, merely because 
it lacks the same kind of sense-demonstration ? 

1 Tyndall's " Fragments of Science," p. 133. 



116 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 



CHAPTER Y. 

FAITHS OF SCIENCE — AIMS AND OBJECTS. 

Thus it is seen that science rests on the same 
grounds and employs the same methods which its 
champions have censured religion for using. 

But perhaps it will be said that, although sci- 
ence and religion have no really different grounds or 
methods, yet the different objects to which they are 
applied in each justify men in refusing to the propo- 
sitions of theology the same credit that they give to 
those of physical inquiry. There is certainly an 
apparent difference of this kind, seeming to many 
very real and broad, which ought not to be omitted 
from any thorough discussion of this subject. An 
opponent of religion would put it something like 
this : 

Religion, perhaps, may employ the same instru- 
mentalities as science, but the trouble is, she aims to 
master with them truths which they are not compe- 
tent to grasp. Science deals with material masses, 
their relations of heat, color, weight, and their 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 117 

of form, bulk, place, quality, etc. — all of 
them things visible and tangible. 

The endeavor of religion, however, is to estab- 
lish the existence, nature, and relations of immate- 
rial beings, called spirits ; a Supreme Spirit behind 
and above all Nature, and minor spirits within each 
human body — things which no sense can ever dis- 
cern. 

Science attends to phenomena, their coexistences 
and successions. It busies itself about those things 
only of which there is or can be experience. Re- 
ligion aspires to go behind the empirical to the met- 
empirical. It talks of ideal conceptions and super- 
sensual objects. 

Science, again, limits itself to the aspects of 
things in their relations to us, under the limitations of 
earthly life, and as they may be clearly comprehend- 
ed by us. Religion, on the contrary, dreams of the 
Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, and loses itself 
in the mazes of the contradictory and the inconceiv- 
able. Behold in this difference of aims and objects 
the ample justification of the modern suspicions of 
religion. Immaterial Spirit, First Cause, Eternal, 
Infinite, Absolute — how can such things ever be 
known % What finger ever touched them, what 
optic or auditory nerve ever gave report of them, 
what telescope was ever or can ever be made so 
space-penetrating, what microscope so delicate in 
its scrutiny as to discern objects of this nature? 
" They are," says Biichner, " arbitrary assumptions 



118 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

without any real basis." " Human thought and 
human knowledge," he maintains, 1 are "incapable of 
discovering or knowing any thing supersensual." 
" The materialist," says Yirchow, " can never be 
satisfied with it : he knows only bodies and their 
cpaalities ; what is beyond he terms transcendental, 
and he considers transcendentalism as an aberration 
of the human mind." 

Indeed, to the physical inquirer, supersensual 
and immaterial things are not even conceivable. 
" A force not united to matter, but floating freely 
above it," Moleschott characterizes as " an ideal no- 
tion." The idea of immaterial spirit, Carl Vogt 
declares to be " a pure hypothesis," and assigns it a 
place among " speculative fables." " The remark 
of a somewhat crazy, but all the more ingenious, 
father of the Church," says the author of the " Old 
Faith and the New " (p. 152), " has become the prin- 
ciple of modern science — ' Naught is immaterial 
but what is naught.' " 

Similarly says Buehner : " Those who talk of a 
creative power which is said to have produced the 
world out of nothing are ignorant of the first and 
most simple principle founded upon experience and 
the contemplation of Nature. How could a power 
have existed not manifested in material substance, 
but governing it arbitrarily according to individual 
views 1 Neither could separately existing forces be 
transferred to chaotic matter, and produce the world 

" Force and Matter," p. xli., Introduction. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. U9 

in this manner ; for we have seen that a separate 
existence of either is an impossibility." 1 

Certainly, say the scientific objectors, it is not 
for man to comprehend God, for the finite to 
think to find out the Infinite. All conceptions in- 
volving Infinity, Self -Existence, Eternity, Absolute 
Being (Herbert Spencer labors at length to show, in 
the second and fourth chapters of his " First Prin- 
ciples," and in other parts of his writings repeats the 
statement again and again), are but "pseudo-ideas," 
" symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order." 
Every religious system "involves itself in the un- 
thinkable." Every theologian who attempts to tell 
the nature of God or the soul falls into contradic- 
tion and absurdity. All the real knowledge that we 
can attain to is, that " the power which the universe 
manifests is utterly inscrutable," a conclusion to 
which Profs. Huxley and Tyndall give repeated and 
emphatic amens. " As little in our day, as in the days 
of Job," says Prof. Tyndall, " can man by searching 
find this power out." 2 Quoting the reply of Napo- 
leon, when, to the savants who tried to account for 
the universe without any Divine agency, raising his 
finger to the heavens, he said, " It is all very well, 
gentlemen, but who made all these % " Prof. Tyn- 
dall says : s "As far as I can see, there is no quality 
in the human intellect which is fit to be applied 

1 " Force and Matter," chapter i. 

* Address before the British Association, Belfast, 1874. 

* Fragments of Science," p. 93. 



120 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

to the solution of tlie problem. It entirely tran- 
scends us. The phenomena of matter and force lie 
within oar intellectual range, and as far as they 
reach we will, at all events, push our inquiries, but 
behind and above and around the real mystery lies 
unsolved, and as far as we are concerned is incapable 
of solution." 

Now, the defender of religion would not deny 
that there are mysteries insoluble both to religion 
and science. He would not deny that we must, 
from the nature of the case, remain ever in igno- 
rance of much, probably of most, that relates to the 
origin and history of the universe, the character, na- 
ture, laws, and relations of Grod and the soul. But 
he claims that, though we cannot know all, though 
we cannot know any thing, perhaps, with absolute 
certainty, yet we can know something with strong 
probability — probability equal to that with which 
men are satisfied in the realm of science. Human 
intellect cannot, of course, fathom to the bottom 
the depths of spirit. It cannot comprehend all the 
mysteries of the Divine. But it can drop the plum- 
met of thought deep enough to know whether that 
which it is dealing with is matter, such as we know, 
or something else. It can trace out a section of the 
Infinite hyperbola sufficient to show whether the 
curve runs by chance or by lavs', whether its course is 
toward the irrational or the rational, toward the evil 
or the good, toward matter or toward spirit. And 
narrow as the circle of warrantable belief may be 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. x 2l 

in comparison with the vast sea of the unknowable 
encircling and confining it, yet Science no more than 
Religion confines her credence to the sphere of the 
senses, the circle of the material, or the range 
wherein nothing inconceivable or contradictory is 
met with. To claim that in this respect there is 
any substantial difference between science and reli- 
gion is a most unfounded pretension. For it can be 
shown, here as before, that Science is in the same 
box as Religion, and shoots her arrows at just as 
transcendental targets. 

First, Science no more than Religion restricts its 
belief to what it can see, hear, touch, smell, feel. 
No more than its rival does it accept the horizon of 
sense as commensurate with the possibilities of 
knowledge or existence. 

The illustrations of this in the circle of the sci- 
ences are countless. If human knowledge had 
been, as Buchner maintains it is, incapable of attain- 
ing to any thing supersensual, its attainments would 
have been comparatively meagre. Take the most 
familiar instructions of science, and half of them 
are things which, if appearance before the bar of 
the senses is to be taken as the test of credence, 
would have to be disbelieved. It is a fundamental 
law in the science of projectiles, for example, that 
a rifle-ball or cannon-shot, discharged from the gun, 
describes in its night a parabola. Yet, what physi- 
cal observer has followed out with his physical eye 
the tracing of that curve through the air from the 

a 



123 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

cannon's month to the point where it fell, so as exactly 
to observe or verify it ? Again, probably no man of 
science doubts that our earth lias poles — points, that 
is, at the extreme north and at the extreme south of 
our globe, so differently situated from all other points 
on the globe that an observer there would find his 
sight of sun and stars unaffected by that daily revo- 
lution that, in every man's past experience, wher- 
ever he may have been, hourly shifts the apparent 
position of the heavenly bodies. Here is a most 
singular phenomenon, opposed to men's daily expe- 
rience, yet held as an unquestioned part of science." 
Nevertheless, no human eye has ever beheld these 
spots, or is ever likely to behold them. No astron- 
omer, again, has ever seen the other side of the 
moon. Yet shall we hesitate to believe that it has 
one? No chemist has ever seen, grasped, tasted, or 
smelt, pure oxygen. Even when Andrews coin- 
pressed it to the density of water, it still remained 
colorless to the eye, tasteless to the tongue, odorless 
to the nose, ungraspable by the hand, manifesting 
itself only by its gravitative, repulsive, chemic, or 
other forces. Shall we consign, therefore, to the 
limits of non-existence what constitutes eight-ninths 
of water, one-half of the earth's crust, and three- 
fourths of organized beings ? 

People in general may be forgiven for thinking 
that the senses are capable of detecting all that ex- 
ists. But the thorough scientist is just the man 
who best knows, or ought to know, how comparative- 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 123 

ly small a part of the universe of things the senses 
can catch a glimpse of. He has scientifically meas- 
ured them and taken the gamut of their power. 
With the sirene he counts the vibrations of audible 
sound, and finds that the ordinary ear can hear no 
note less than fifteen vibrations a second nor more 
than forty-two thousand. Below or above this limit 
there is silence to the human ear, yet he does not 
believe that the vibration of the air ceases, or would 
be inaudible to an auditory organ of wider compass. 
With the prism he untwists the rays of the solar 
beam, and by delicate processes measures their ve- 
locity. Only those whose rates exceed three hun- 
dred and ninety-nine billion vibrations a second, or 
fall below eight hundred and thirty-one billion, 1 are 
visible to the eye. Yet the man of science does not 
regard the vibrations as ceasing beyond these limits. 
When at the extreme red end of the spectrum they 
cease to be visible, the thermometer and the ther- 
mopyle still detect them by their heat, and beyond 
the extreme violet the phenomena of fluorescence 
or photo-chemical action disclose them as chemical 
force. " The light-giving rays from any object are 
only a fraction," says Tyndall, " of the total radia- 
tion." In the electric light, for instance, they con- 
stitute no more than one-ninth. 4 

There are thus sounds to which we are deaf, 
light to which we are blind, heat, magnetism, elec- 

1 Herschel's "Familiar Lectures," p. 312. 
5 " Fragments of Science," p. 206. 



124 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

tricity to wliicli we are insensible. A thousand forms 
of force strike us hourly, and our dull nerves know 
it not. A thousand objects and motions envelop r.s, 
and the narrow boundaries of our organs fail to 
take them in. It was in the belief that there was a 
vast deal more to see than the naked eye could dis- 
cern, that physical investigators with infinite inge- 
nuity and patience have contrived instruments for 
magnifying the invisible, until it was brought within 
the scope of sense. 

And their faith has been well rewarded. In 
what seemed the blank darkness of the heavens 
there have been revealed to them suns and nebulse, 
planets and attendant moons. In what seemed a 
simple, unoccupied drop of water, there has been 
disclosed a host of both organic and inorganic bod- 
ies, the plants as actively moving as the animals, 
and the mineral particles dancing about with as in- 
cessant motion as if alive. In the last half -century 
the men of science have seen telescope and micro- 
scope continually increased in power, and other 
instruments, equally wonderful in widening the 
realm of observation, invented and improved, and 
never have they found increased power fail to dis- 
cover beyond the former limit of perception still 
more phenomena. 

Suppose these instruments still further increased, 
no matter how much, and who doubts that still 
new sights, now undiscernible, would open before 
us ? Or suppose that human ingenuity should de- 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 125 

vise telescopes and microscopes for the ear, for the 
sense of taste, smell, or touch, and who doubts that 
facts before imperceptible by any sense would be- 
come revealed to us ? The very possibility, how- 
ever, of such greater victories of sense implies real 
and knowable existence beyond the grasp of pres- 
ent sense. 

In their own field of inquiry, physicists freely 
assert this. Tyndall justly speaks of " that region 
inaccessible to sense, which embraces so much of 
the intellectual life of the physical investigator." 

De La Rive ascribed the haze of the Alps to 
floating organic germs; and the advocates of the 
germ theory of disease and the opponents of spon- 
taneous generation maintain, as their basic fact, the 
profuse existence in common air of such living 
germs, pelting us every moment, yet unf elt and un- 
seen. Whether or not such infinitesimal organic 
germs exist, yet we have in the atmosphere," says 
Tyndall, 1 " particles that defy both the microscope 
and the balance, which do not darken the air, and 
which exist, nevertheless, in multitudes sufficient to 
reduce to insignificance the Israelitish hyperbole re- 
garding the sands upon the sea-shore." 

To identify what the microscope fails to see 
with the non-existent, Prof. Tyndall deems so grave 
an error as to take pains to caution biologists against 
it. " When, for example, the contents of a cell are 
described as perfectly, homogeneous, as absolutely 

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 151. 



126 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

structureless, because the microscope fails to distin- 
guish any structure, then, I think the microscope 
begins to play a mischievous part," and he proceeds 
to point out, in regard to the profound and complex 
changes of structure which occur when water is 
frozen or polarized, that absolutely none of them 
can be discerned by the microscope. " The causes 
in which similar conditions hold," he adds, " are 
simply numberless. Have the diamond, the ame- 
thyst, and the countless other crystals formed in the 
laboratories of Nature and of man no structure 1 
Assuredly they have ; but what can the microscope 
make of it % Nothing." l 

From the mineralogist and biologist, turn to the 
chemist. Ask him if he makes the limit of the 
senses, even when widened to the utmost range to 
which the most delicate instruments can push it, the 
limit, in his belief, of real existence or knowledge — 
and what must be his honest answer ? To show you 
how the whole of chemistry, as a systematized science, 
is based upon the existence of the molecule and the 
atom. When the chemist deals with his various 
substances, he meets such problems as these : How 
can a body dilate and contract, be melted, vapor- 
ized, or solidified ? What puts a limit to the pro- 
cess of attenuation ? Why do chemical substances 
unite only in definite proportions ? And the result 
to which he is brought is that a body, such as a grain 
ji salt, is not a simple compact body, but an aggre- 
1 "Fragments of Science," pp. 152, 153. 



FAITHS OF SCIFXCF. 127 

gation of minute corpuscles, which he calls mole- 
cules, and these molecules, in their turn, a group of 
still smaller and simpler particles, called atoms. 
The aggregate formed bj these particles seems to 
our senses solid, continuous, and motionless, yet in 
reality neither its molecules nor its atoms are in 
contact, nor remain a single minute at rest. By a 
certain repulsive power, each atom holds itself off 
from too close proximity to its neighbor. By a 
certain attractive power it draws toward it such 
atoms as it has an affinity for, disengages them from 
other groups, and brings them into league with it- 
self. Through the play of their mutual forces, the 
atoms are marshaled in just the right number into 
a certain order or position. With ceaseless oscilla- 
tions all these atoms are swinging to and fro, cir- 
cling around some point of equilibrium. Send a 
current of electricity through the midst of them, and 
their path becomes more or less elliptic ; put them 
under the influence of a magnet, and they assume a 
peculiar helicoidal motion in varying planes. Ap- 
ply heat, and the vibrations become ampler and 
more rapid. Increase the heat, and they leave 
their circular paths and fly off tangentially, moving 
rectilineally through space. Atoms clash against 
atoms, rebound, and with ceaseless impact cannon- 
ade whatever object would hem them in. Joule 
calculated the velocity of this atomic bombardment, 
and found that the boasted guns of modern warfare 
are unable to compete with it. Sir William Thorn- 



128 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

son has estimated tlieir size, and set down the maxi- 
mum distance of the chemical atoms in molecules as 
the ten-millionth part of one-twenty-fifth of an inch. 
Other mathematicians have computed their weights 
and energies. The things which naturally give to 
us the highest conception of force and majesty are 
the grand bodies that march so ceaselessly through 
the heavens, the tidal movement of oceans from end 
to end of the globe, or the fall of huge masses un- 
der the power of gravity ; but all this energy is as 
nothing in comparison with that which is found to 
lie in the atoms. It is the nature and force of the 
atoms that give its shape to the crystal, its quality 
to the acid or alkali, their color, odor, softness, or 
hardness to substances. It is the atoms that build 
up every individual body from a drop of water to a 
whirling sun. 

Now, of all this, the accepted basis of theoreti- 
cal chemistry and thermodynamics, how much can 
be produced before the bar of the senses ? Of 
these units of matter, how many have been iso- 
lated, separately weighed, measured, or touched ? 
Not a single one. Of these ceaseless motions, how 
much has been felt or seen ? Of these constant 
clashes, how much has been heard ? None at all. 
If the microscope was not delicate enough to dis- 
cern the particles which give the azure to the sky, 
or the infusorial germ which disseminates an epidem- 
ic, how far beyond its power of detection must be 
these atoms, thousands of which are needed to make 



faiths of science: 129 

the smallest of those bodies ? Prof. Tyndall, allud- 
ing to Sir William Thomson's studies upon the mo- 
lecular process involved in the magnetic polariza- 
tion of light, has said * that, " while dealing with 
this question, he lived in a world of matter and 
motion, to which the microscope has no passport, 
and in which it can afford no aid." That must 
be the case with every one who would learn any 
thing of either molecule or atom. Nevertheless, 
the scientific world believes in them, talks of them, 
and uses them, not only in its theoretical reasonings, 
but in its practical applications and current instruc- 
tions. 

If it receives its warrant from no sense, whence, 
then, does it derive its belief in these imperceptible 
workers, everywhere present and active — these in- 
visible kings governing Nature by eternal laws? 
Evidently from just such mental apprehensions 
and inferences as assure religion of God and the 
soul. 

We have tracked scientific faith beyond the 
farthest ken of the microscope to the infinitesimal 
mote, beyond the mote to the molecule, beyond the 
molecule to the still minuter, more undiscernible 
atom. Does scientific faith here at length make a 
halt and refuse to go farther ? Ask optics, and 
hear for its answer its report of the existence, as it 
believes, of a substance still more tenuous and im- 
palpable, still farther beyond any possible discern- 

1 "Fragments of Science," p. 153, 



130 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ment by any sense. In the time of Newton, light 
was looked upon as a subtile kind of matter emitted 
from luminous bodies, and shot out upon the senses. 
The interplanetary and interstellar spaces were voids, 
merely traversed by these minute missiles. But 
serious objections, arising from the peculiar phe- 
nomena of refraction, interference, and polarization 
of light successively presented themselves. To ex- 
plain these, natural philosophers were led to the 
theory that the motions of light were those of vibra- 
tion, not of translation. But where there are vi- 
brations, there must be something to vibrate. Phys- 
ics, therefore, filled again the whole universe with a 
something which it called ether, which might serve 
as the vehicle of the luminous waves. This ether, 
it is believed, surrounds every particle, penetrates 
every body, fills all space. The hardest iron is not 
impervious to it. The most complete atmospheric 
vacuum, even the desert voids that reign between 
star and star, are full of it, and the absence of com- 
mon matter only serves to transmit the better the 
ethereal waves. A ray of light passing from the 
sun to the earth is a column of ether in vibration. 
Along it run countless waves, from thirty thousand 
to seventy thousand in a single inch, and with such 
amazing velocity that trillions of them enter the eye 
in the briefest glance at any object. The atoms 
which it bathes obey it docilely, like balls floating 
upon the water, rising and falling with its waves. 
Round their centre of rest they swing in little orbits, 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 131 

now longer, now smaller, now circular, now elliptical. 
At every point this ether exerts forces of enormous 
intensity. Sir John Herschel has calculated that its 
power of resistance to pressure (and conversely its 
own possible pressure on objects that resist it) is up- 
ward of seventeen billions of pounds, 1 and that the 
intensity of the coercive force called into action in 
the excitement of a luminous vibration must be 
thirty thousand million times that of gravity. 2 In 
comparison with the bulk of this ether, ordinary 
matter forms but a very trifling part of the universe. 
For, even if we disregard the ether diffused through 
ordinary matter and interplanetary spaces, and sup- 
pose the whole of our solar system filled with ordi- 
nary matter, the proportion between it and the ethe- 
real sphere whose radius is the distance of the near- 
est fixed star would be only as one to eleven trill- 
ions. 

And now, if we inquire, again, what warrant from 
experience has Science for believing in the lumi- 
nous ether, our answer is as before — none. Though 
the medium of vision, it and its vibrations are far- 
ther beyond all visibleness than the tiniest molecule. 
Though more tenacious than steel, we move through 
it constantly without feeling it. Though so enor- 
mous is its pressure, no balance can weigh it. 
Though touching us on every side every second, no 
touch of ours can detect it. As Prof. Tyndail 3 has 

1 "Familiar Lectures," p. 282. 2 Ibid., p. 315. 

3 " Fragments of Science," p. 215. 



132 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

himself said, " the domain in which this motion of 
light is carried on lies entirely beyond the reach of 
our senses. The waves of light require a medium 
for their formation and propagation, but we cannot 
see or feel or taste or smell this medium. How, 
then, has its existence been established ? By show- 
ing that by the assumption of this wonderful, in- 
tangible ether all the phenomena of optics are 
accounted for with a fullness, and clearness, and 
conclusiveness, which leave no desire of the intel- 
lect unfulfilled." 

But if science may accept the perception and 
satisfaction of the reason as good proof of what no 
observation can discover, why should religion be 
debarred a similar privilege ? 

" All that we see of the world," says Pascal, " is 
but an imperceptible scratch in the vast range of 
Nature." "And the claim of mere experimental- 
ism," Papillon well adds, " is that it may sentence 
men to the fixed and stubborn contemplation of this 
mere scratch." 

So far from phenomena comprising all that we 
can know, the truth is that phenomena give only the 
lowest grade of knowledge, and the highest is that 
which most transcends phenomena. Prof. Huxley, 1 
speaking of Auguste Comte's " Positive Philosophy," 
says . that the word " positive," " as implying a sys- 
tem of thought which assumes nothing beyond the 
content of observed facts, implies that which never 
1 " Lay Sermons," p. 161. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 133 

did exist and never will." The outward and visible 
phenomena are but the raw material of knowledge, 
or, to use the expression of Tyndall, 1 " the counters 
of the intellect," " and our science," as he goes on 
to say, " would not be worthy of its name and fame, 
if it halted at facts, however practically useful, and 
neglected the laws which accompany and rule phe- 
nomena." 

The first step in science, then, is, to group facts 
about some thought. Then these first classifications 
must be illuminated by some more general concep- 
tion ; and if a science is to be developed to the high- 
est grade these general conceptions must be synthe- 
sized in some law of its laws — some one grand idea 
summing it all up. What the physical inquirer thus 
pursues amid his retorts, his herbariums, mineralogi- 
cal cabinets, or zoological museums, is ideas ; and in 
the present state of science there is nothing more 
remarkable than the ideal nature of its results. We 
have seen this already in regard to chemistry and 
optics. If we look at geometry we find it to be 
throughout a work of mental construction, grounded 
upon and guided by pure mental insight of space, 
and reasonings therefrom. Had geometrical truths 
required for acceptance phenomenal demonstration, 
we should not have known a single proposition. An 
exact right angle has no existence as a phenomenon, 
a perfect sphere is impossible as a fact. 

Arithmetic and algebra, similarly, are ideal con- 
1 "Fragments of Science," p 227. 



134 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

structions built up from the metaphysical conception 
of number. It may be said that the idea of number 
is simply borrowed from the phenomenal world. 
But, as we have it, and use it, it is stripped thorough- 
ly of concrete objectivity, and reduced to simple re- 
lations between symbolic objects. If number be 
altogether a teaching of experience, where did ex- 
perience observe its two poles — zero and infinity ? 

In astronomy, resting as it does on geometry and 
arithmetic, there is necessarily the same idealness. 
Kepler's laws of planetary action, and Newton's laws 
of motion, are not laws of fact, but types of the 
scientific imagination. The postulates of the as- 
tronomer, uniform velocity and elliptical motion, 
have no place in exact reality. The same is true of 
that which the science of mechanics rests on — uni- 
form force and rectilineal motion. No eye has seen 
or shall see it. So, again, in electricity, magnetism, 
thermodynamics, the subtile analyses of modern in- 
vestigators have banished altogether the former 
theories of material fluids, and substituted the con- 
ception of invisible forces. The scientific energies 
now believed in are not physical things, but mental 
data. Gravity, for example, is not a material entity, 
but the correlate of thought to motion, the occult 
cause inferred by the mind where change of place is 
observed. The fact, in fine, is, as George H. Lewes l 
has said, " Were the whole circle of the sciences to 
pass 1 before us, each would in turn display the essen- 
1 " Problems of Life and Mind," p. 2*71. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 135 

tially ideal nature of its construction," and again, in 
his " Philosophy of Aristotle" (p. 66), " The funda- 
mental ideas of modern science are as transcendental 
as any of the axioms in ancient philosophy." 

If transcendentalism he justifiable with science, 
why should it be an aberration of mind with religion I 
If the inability of sense to discern many of the things 
that science believes in is no bar to a valid knowl- 
edge of material things, why should it disprove the 
existence of spiritual things ? 

Because, perhaps the man of science may here 
respond, because all things that science believes 
really to exist, though in some cases not such as can 
be actually observed, owing to the weakness of our 
senses, are always conceivably so. Imagine our 
powers of observation sufficiently increased, and they 
would become visible and tangible. They belong to 
the realm of matter and its qualities ; the quantity 
of matter may be very attenuated, but it is matter 
still. Whatever ideal constructions science uses are 
derived from material phenomena, and are reducible 
again to it, or translatable in terms of body and its 
functions, or, if not, are recognized as mere fictions, 
convenient for calculation or statement, but not re- 
garded as things actually existing. To use the recent 
distinction which Lewes has proposed, science is 
often metaphysical, but never metempirical ; it ac- 
cepts the extra-sensible but not the super-sensible. 
All that is immaterial is, in the view of science, 
non-existent. 



136 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

Were these statements true, there certainly would 
exist here an essential difference between the objects 
of religion and those of science. It may be venture- 
some to deny them, but it does not seem to me that 
they are valid. Science, it seems to me, in many 
points, implies at least, if it does not directly recog- 
nize, the existence of the immaterial. 

All the objects that science studies are seen in 
space. All the events that it traces are known as 
occurring in time. These two, space and time, are 
fundamental conditions of all science. Yet neither 
space nor time is itself a material thing. The exten- 
sion of a body, the duration of a motion or change, 
are, to be sure, qualities of material things. But 
the space which receives and incloses all extended 
matter, the time which is the ground of all suc- 
cession or duration, these are not even conceivably 
to be seen or heard or felt, not even conceivably to 
be regarded as substances, however infinitely attenu- 
ated. Sense may tell us of the finite extension of 
an individual object, but sense has never and can 
never tell us of the Infinite Space which the appre- 
hension of each particular extension presupposes. 
From experience we may learn of the order and 
duration of particular occurrences. But from ex- 
perience we cannot learn of the Eternal Time which 
is the implied condition of all temporal events. 
Shall space and time, then, be set down as fictions of 
the intellect? That equally is impossible without 
destroying the whole edifice of knowledge. For 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 137 

their existence is involved in the existence of every 
object and property of the actual world. 

The existence of what is immaterial seems to be 
involved, again, in any satisfactory explanation of 
the dynamics of Nature. How, for example, if we 
suppose no other kind of force in existence than that 
which is a property of material objects and seated in 
them, can the attraction of gravitation, cohesion and 
adhesion, the repulsion of heat, the occurrence of 
both attractive and repulsive forces in magnetism 
and electricity, be explained ? Immense voids sepa- 
rate planet from planet, star from star. Yet the 
force of gravitation almost instantly passes from one 
to the other. Great intervals may separate two 
electric currents, or a magnet from a magnetic body ; 
and yet the electric or magnetic force will act from 
one to the other. For example, it is now considered 
proved that the sun acts upon the earth as a magnet. 
Even between molecule and molecule similar inter- 
spaces exist. In the hardest of substances, the scien- 
tific men tell us, the molecules are not in contact with 
their neighboring molecules. Were they so, bodies 
would be absolutely incompressible. The fact is, 
however, that there is no body that is not more or 
less compressible. Those that are but slightly com- 
pressible by the most powerful mechanical means, 
contract or interpenetrate under the force of chemi- 
cal affinity. Sulphuric acid and water, though not 
sensibly yielding to pressure, yet, when mixed, give 
a resulting volume considerably less than the aggre- 



138 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

gate volume of the two liquids used. According to 
Faraday we may cast into potassium its equivalent 
of oxygen, and again both oxygen and hydrogen in 
a twofold number of atoms, and yet, with all these 
additions, the matter shall become less and less till 
it is not two-thirds of its original volume. A space 
which would be tilled by four hundred and thirty 
atoms of potassium may thus be made to contain 
seven hundred of potassium and twenty-one hundred 
of oxygen and hydrogen. 

Such experiments make it evident that consider- 
able interspaces separate even the nearest atoms. 
Now, if there be no force except that which is a 
quality of some material body, and seated in it, how 
can these various forms pass beyond the periphery 
of their respective material seats, traverse these void 
spaces, and act upon other bodies at a distance ? 

Is it conceivable that a material body can, through 
its strictly material force, act where it does not exist, 
or where no medium intervenes through which to 
transmit its force ? Let the great discoverer of 
gravitation answer. " It is inconceivable," says 
Newton, in a celebrated passage of his letter to 
Bentley, " that inanimate brute matter should, with- 
out the mediation of something else, which is not 
material, operate upon and affect other matter with- 
out mutual contact. . . . That gravity should be in- 
nate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one 
body may act upon another through a vacuum, with- 
out the mediation of any thing else, by and through 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 139 

which their action and force may be conveyed from 
one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity that 
I believe no man, who in philosophical matters has 
a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into 
it." 

Or, if more modern authority is desired, the re- 
cent and weighty words of Prof. Challis * and Prof. 
Maxwell may be quoted : 

" There is no other kind of force than pressure 
by contact of one body with another. . . . llierule 
of philosophy which makes personal sensation and 
experience the basis of scientific knowledge . . . 
forbids recognizing any other mode of moving a 
body than this. When, therefore, a body is caused 
to move without apparent contact and pressure of 
another body, it must still be concluded that the 
pressing body, although invisible, exists, unless we 
are prepared to admit that there are physical opera- 
tions which are and ever will be incomprehensible 
to us. . . . All physical force being pressure, there 
must be a medium by which the pressure is exerted. 1 ' 

" If something," says Prof. Clerk Maxwell, 2 " is 
transmitted from one particle to another at a dis- 
tance, what is its condition after it has left the one 
particle and before it has reached the other % If this 
something is the potential energy of the two parti- 
cles, how are we to conceive this energy as existing 
in a point of space coinciding neither with the one 

1 Philosophical Magazine, vol. xxxii., § 4, p. 467. 

2 " Electricity and Magnetism," vol. ii., p. 437. 



140 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

particle nor the other? In fact, whenever energy 
is transmitted from one body to another in time, 
there must be a medium or substance in which the 
energy exists." 

Suppose, then, in order that we may interpret 
gravitation and the other attractive forces as ma- 
terial forces, we boldly diffuse through all the vast 
regions where they are displayed, between star and 
star, between molecule and molecule, an invisible 
intervening medium, bathing them on all sides, and 
pressing them one toward another. Suppose we Eay, 
as Prof. Challis does, that the luminous ether pre- 
sents to us, as actually existing, such an omnipresent, 
ever-pressing medium, and that the vibratory motion 
of atoms or larger material bodies in the midst of 
this sea of ether is sufficient, in accordance with 
Prof. Guthrie's famous experiments, and Sir William 
Thonlson's calculations, to direct the ethereal press- 
ure upon gravitative, cohesive, or magnetic centres. 
Still the difficulty is not overcome. To interpret 
gravitation thus, as transmission of pressure through 
the luminiferous ether, seems inconsistent with the 
instant, or almost instant, action of gravitation 
through the greatest distances. The velocity of 
light through the ether, though exceedingly swift, 
yet occupies quite an appreciable time — several min- 
utes in passing from planet to planet, and years in 
going from star to star. But the velocity of gravi- 
tation, if any finite measure can be given to it, is at 
least, according to Laplace's calculations, fifty mill- 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 141 

ion times that of light. Moreover, if attraction be 
a result of ethereal pressure, what is there without 
the ether to press it thus ever inward ? or, if there 
is nothing, what prevents it, as Sir John Herschel 
asked, from expanding into infinite space, and losing 
itself there? Is it conceivable that this ether, any 
more than other matter, should be free from all 
discontinuity, all division into constituent parts and 
intervals between them ? If not, then the existence 
of such an unbroken, continuous substance, penetrat- 
ing all bodies and filling all the interstices of grosser 
matter, and acting as the transmitting medium to 
the forces of bodies, ought to make all solids and 
liquids transparent to light, heat, and electricity. 
Such a medium ought not, at least, to be both a con- 
ductor and a non-conductor of electricity, both trans- 
parent and opaque to light, both a heat-transmitter 
and a heat-absorbent. 

Again, if the ether has no void spaces anywhere 
in it, then it must absolutely fill space full. How, 
then, is any of that motion of which all Nature is 
full, and which the materialists tell us constitutes 
all varieties of force, possible ? If a body is to move 
with momentum, so as to give a shock, there must 
be space for it to move through. Before it can 
move at all, there must be a free space for it to 
move into. If it pushes weaker matter away to 
make room for itself, then there must be free space 
for that weaker matter to move into. If all space 
be already full, motion is impossible. Theoretically, 



142 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

then, the ether cannot be destitute of void intervals 
between its parts ; and, in point of fact, physicists 
regard it, like all other matter, as composed of its 
separate ethereal atoms, situated at distances which, 
in proportion to the size of the ether-atom, are fully 
as great as, if not vastly greater than, the intervals of 
common matter. Subtile, then, as is the hypothesis 
of an omnipresent ethereal medium, pressing all 
matter together, the difficulty of action at a distance 
remains undiminished. 

If the leaping of force over the ninety-two mill- 
ion miles of celestial space that separates the sun from 
the earth requires either an intervening medium 
through which it may act, or some other interpreta- 
tion of it than as transmission of material motion or 
pressure or other quality seated in matter, equally 
does the passage over the minutest atomic interval ; 
and, as we cannot go on forever imagining finer 
and finer media — as we must somewhere leave the 
room that will give opportunity for motion — ought 
we not frankly to accept the opposite alternative — 
the acceptance of force as something capable of act- 
ing, and therefore existing where matter does not 
exist, as, in fine, an immaterial principle % 

Perhaps it may be said that Le Sage's famous 
hypothesis, which Sir William Thomson recently re- 
suscitated, is sufficient to explain gravitation and all 
other kinds of attractive force without supposing 
any thing else than motions and qualities of matter. 
This hypothesis supposes that an infinity of atoms 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 143 

fly with excessive velocity through all mundane 
regions, inward bound from the immensity of ultra- 
mundane space. Ceaselessly pelting all objects on 
all sides, the result is that any two objects at a cer- 
tain distance apart will, in reference to each other, 
be mutually screened from this bombardment on the 
faces looking toward each other, and will thus be 
reciprocally attracted. This is certainly the boldest, 
the most ingenious, the most purely mechanical of 
all explanations of attractive force. But, leaving 
unnoticed its pure hypotheticalness and transcend- 
ence of all possible experience, this theory but re- 
moves its difficulties to other points. Whence is 
derived this celestial storm? "We must go outside 
the world of stars for that. On this theory, as on 
that of Challis, 1 " the universe is not even tempora- 
rily automatic, but must be fed from moment to 
moment by an agency external to itself." The 
drawing together of bodies may possibly be ex- 
plained by the pressure of such an atomic hailstorm ; 
but it presents no explanation of what is equally in- 
consistent with any interpretation of force as a trans- 
mission of material motion or pressure, namely, the 
repulsive powers exhibited by gases, and by solids 
and fluids when heated, magnetized, or electrified. 
Moreover, it brings us squarely up against another 
form of physical force, explicable only as an imma- 
terial principle. I mean the force of elasticity. If 
these invisible pelting atoms be hard and inelastic, 

1 American Journal of Science and Arts, October, 1874, p. 306. 



144 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

then every time they strike a body they must lose 
some of their energy. As Sir John Ilerschel l saye, 
" in the collision of inelastic bodies, vis viva is ne- 
cessarily and invariably destroyed. . . . Taking sucb 
a system in its entirety (where force exists not), there 
is no possibility of its reproduction. . . . Such an 
arrangement must of necessity be rapidly self-de- 
structive, and must result in the gradual but speedy 
dying away of all relative motion." 

In order, then, that the system of Nature be 
conceived as permanent, in order that our theory 
may harmonize with the observed constancy of the 
physical forces, the atoms must be capable of so re- 
bounding that after a collision they shall have the 
same velocity as before. This Sir William Thomson 
perceived, and in his reconstruction of Le Sage's 
theory employed as materials, not hard atoms, but 
molecules of perfect elasticity. 

But whence is this elasticity obtained, and what 
is the nature of elastic force? This is an inquiry, 
important not only in this connection, but for any 
adequate explanation of all those numerous phenom- 
ena, in solids, in fluids, especially in gases, in which 
elasticity is involved. Take a gas, for example, 
which presses on all sides upon the envelope con- 
taining it. The mechanical explanation of this is, 
that the gas is constituted of material particles which 
move in all possible directions, each in a right line, 
and which change direction without change of ve- 
1 " Familiar Lectures," pp. 465, 466. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 145 

locity where they meet a fixed obstacle. The press- 
ure of the gas is due to the shocks of the gaseous 
molecules against the containing walls. Now, such 
an inclosed gas, if left in an hermetical vessel, does 
not gradually lose its force of pressure till it be- 
comes nothing, but retains it undiminished. This 
simple fact implies that the gaseous molecules, when 
they strike their containing walls or collide with one 
another, as they are continually doing, rebound with 
the same velocity with which they struck. We say 
this is because the gaseous molecules possess elastic 
force, and imagine the matter explained. But let 
us follow out in thought the course of a molecule 
when it strikes an obstacle and rebounds, and we 
may not, perhaps, be so easily satisfied. First, upon 
the occurrence of a collision, the molecule loses all 
its own velocity, it comes to a dead halt for an infi- 
nitely short instant, and then it regains an equal ve- 
locity in a contrary direction. TVe see, then, that to 
effect this, there must be something which is capa- 
ble, first, of destroying established movement ; then, 
when the body has been brought to a state of repose, 
starting it again with a velocity equal to what it had 
before. What, then, is the nature of this something, 
possessed of so great and unique a power ? Does it 
reside in the material atom as one of its properties ? 
Let us compress our gas, observe the relation of its 
temperature under compression to the degree of 
compression, and we shall have a crucial test which 
will tell us whether the material atoms are elastic 
7 



14:6 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

and variable in volume or not. If the atoms them- 
selves are elastic and variable in volume, then the 
gas, the sum of them, may be compressed without 
increasing the atomic motion, that is, the heat in the 
gas; and after compression the atoms may expand 
without requiring any expenditure of atomic motion 
or thermal energy. But if the atoms be not them- 
selves elastic or variable in volume, then compression 
of the gas signifies a lessening of the atomic inter- 
vals, and consequently a greater atomic velocity or 
heat, and the reexpansion of the gas would require 
the expenditure again of this atomic motion to re- 
store the atoms to their previous stations. 

The opposite results of the two hypotheses are 
then clear. Equally clear is the decisive answer of 
all thermodynamical experiments, that there is no 
compression without a corresponding production of 
heat, and no expansion of a compressed body against 
pressure without the expenditure of heat. The 
whole science of thermodynamics rests on the defi- 
nite and constant correlation of work and heat, and 
is incompatible with variability of volume in the 
atoms. 1 

Can the elastic rebound, then, be the result in 
each case of some anterior motion, in accordance 
with the view of these pure materialists who would 
hold as a first law, " no motion without anterior 
motion ? " The sufficient answer is that, in the case 

1 See " Consequences de la Therrnodynamique," par G. A. Him, 
p. 208. 



FAITHS OF SCIENQK 147 

of the elastic rebound, the resilient motion is sepa- 
rated from all previous motion by an instant, infinite- 
ly short, perhaps, but still an actual instant of rest, 
during which the direction of movement is reversed. 
The difficulty cannot be escaped. 

Suppose, even, we say that the atom, like an 
ivory ball, changes its form upon collision with an 
object, that it is composed of component parts, and 
that an internal vibratory movement of them is set 
up, in consequence of which the atom first seeks to 
regain its old form, and next, this internal motion, 
passing into translatory motion, the whole atom re- 
bounds — the difficulty is only transferred from the 
whole atom to the component particles or atoms of 
the atom. Whence the tendency of one of these 
particles to return to its place ? What is the force 
that, when it has swung to its farthest limit and 
stops then for its infinitesimal second of rest, starts it 
from rest into motion % 'No anterior motion can 
explain this, for between the anterior and the pos- 
terior motion is always this intervening moment of 
rest. 1 

If, as Du Bois-Reymond says, and as is logically 
required by the very conception of it, " the proper- 
ties of matter can neither be extended outside of 
itself nor transferred to other material objects," 
then they are plainly unequal to explaining the phe- 
nomena of elasticity as well as those of attraction 

1 " Consequences de la Thermodynamique," par G. A. Hirn, 
livre ii., chapitre i. 



148 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

and repulsion. To explain adequately these funda- 
mental, constant, and ubiquitous properties of Na- 
ture, we must conceive force, not as the materialists 
tell us we can alone properly conceive it, as " the 
property inseparable from and eternally inherent in 
matter," as " a motion arising from some previous 
motion and acting through bodily contact or inter- 
vening medium," but as the very reverse of that — 
as a power which does not depend on anterior mo- 
tion, which can exist and act where no material me- 
dium is present — in short, as an immaterial principle. 
But if Science can find explanation of many of its 
most fundamental phenomena only in such a prin- 
ciple, why should it be called " a speculative fable " 
when presented by the religious thinker ? If even 
in physical relations the difficulties in getting along 
without supposing the immaterial are greater than 
the difficulty of supposing it, why in spiritual rela- 
tions, also, may not it be credited as being some- 
thing more than " naught ?" 

But the beliefs of religion, it will be replied, are 
directed to that which it is not merely difficult to 
know, but which it is impossible to know — some- 
thing which is absolutely inconceivable. All our 
knowledge is relative, that is, a knowledge of a 
thing through its relations and contrasts with some- 
thing else. How, then, can we know the Absolute, 
the One Supreme, existing in and by himself ? All 
our knowledge is of appearances and through the 
senses. How, then, can we know that which is said 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 149 

to lie beyond appearances, and is certainly inacces- 
sible to tbe senses — spirit ? 

Man, and all that belongs to him, is finite. He 
passes his few fleeting days, indeed, as a pigmy, in 
a little corner of the universe. Even in his bright- 
est achievements his powers are narrowly limited. 
There is nothing infinite either in his experi- 
ences or in his nature. How, then, can he conceive 
the Infinite ? If, even in imagination, he seek to 
follow out any mode of the infinite, he ever falls 
short — no matter how immense his mental flight — 
within the bounds of the finite. Were it possible to 
follow through in thought an infinite whole, an infi- 
nite time would be required for the operation. 
Theologians may talk glibly of soul and over-soul, 
creator and creation, absolute and infinite ; they 
may fancy that they understand them ; but they are 
only deceiving themselves, mistaking familiarity 
with words for a genuine understanding of things. 
Their high-sounding terms are but covers to their 
real ignorance. The realities themselves, if there 
are realities here, are mysteries beyond all compre- 
hension. The endeavor to conceive of any of them 
is, as Strauss says of the idea of a Creator, but 
" merely dealing with an idle phantasy." This is 
no trumped-up objection, due to the envy of Science. 
It is a difficulty which metaphysicians and theologi- 
ans themselves have recognized and stated, a diffi" 
culty which beset the path of the most ancient 
thinkers, which has been affirmed by the acutest 



150 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

intellects of modern times, such as Pascal, Kant, 
Hamilton, and Mansel, and which is fatal to the 
claims of religion. Valid knowledge is to he found 
only by confining ourselves strictly to that realm 
to which Science limits herself — the realm of the 
conceivable, that is, of the relative and the phenom- 
enal. 

Let ns see how this is. It is, indeed, the com- 
mon aim of Science to keep within the field, not of 
phenomena, for we have seen that its highest tri- 
umphs are in the regions above phenomena, but of 
that which can be readily demonstrated and verified, 
and which can be clearly comprehended. And su- 
perficial observers, who notice only the exactness of 
its measurements, the constancy and regularity of its 
laws, the rigor of its demonstrations, generally fancy 
it a realm absolutely free from all mysteries. But 
the genuine savant, who is not content with the regis- 
tration of facts, but would know what at bottom is 
their significance and explanation, knows science to 
be a region of very different character, full of puz- 
zling perplexities and marvelous hypotheses, thick 
set witli dilemmas that land him in the inconceiv- 
able, and with problems that have to be given up as 
insoluble. " If you wish to be initiated into the 
interior of physics," says Novalis, " you must be 
initiated into the mysteries of poetry." No flight 
of dramatist's fancy is wilder than some of the 
sober theories of mathematicians. And, the more 
we investigate Nature, the more miracles we find 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 151 

before our eyes. As Stanley Jevons * well says : 
" Scientific method mnst begin and end with the 
laws of thought, but it does not follow that it will 
save us from encountering inexplicable, and, at 
least, apparently contradictory results. . . . Science 
does nothing to reduce the number of strange things 
that we may believe. When fairly pursued it makes 
large drafts upon oiir powers of comprehension and 
belief." 

There is no force, for example, better established 
scientifically than the force of gravity. Yet it in- 
volves the greatest inconceivabilities. It possesses, 
in the first place, a velocity almost, if not actually, 
instantaneous. It must act through vacuous space ; 
if not vacuous interstellar space, yet vacuous atomic 
intervals. 2\Tot only does it thus act where there is 
no intervening medium, but, more perplexing still, 
in perfect indifference to all intervening obstacles. 
Light, in spite of its velocity and the etherealness 
of its medium, is either stopped or deflected, more 
or less, by almost every substance ; but all media 
are to gravity perfectly transparent ; nothing is able 
either to reflect, refract, or absorb it ; and two points 
on opposite sides of the globe attract each other as 
if there were absolutely nothing between them. 

Again, gravitation, as Faraday has shown, 2 is at 

1 " Principles of Science," vol. ii., pp. 466, 467. 

2 See Faraday's paper on the " Conservation of Force," pp. 364, 
366, 368, " Correlation and Conservation of Forces," edited by E. 
L. Yournans, M. D. 



152 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

odds with the fundamental doctrine of the conser- 
vation of energy, and also with that of inertia. The 
received idea of gravity as a simple attractive force 
between any two or all the particles or masses, at 
every sensible distance, with a strength varying in- 
versely as the square of the distance, appears to 
Faraday to involve inconceivable inconsistencies. In 
the case of the diminution of the distance, say to 
one-tenth, and the consequent increase of the force 
a hundred-fold, it implies an actual creation of force, 
and that to an enormous extent ; and in the reverse 
case, where the distance is increased tenfold and the 
power diminished to a hundredth of its previous 
amount, it implies an actual annihilation of force ; 
effects requiring the intervention of Infinite Crea- 
tive Power. 

Again, the current idea of gravity supposes that 
a single isolated particle would have no gravitative 
force, but that, the moment another single particle 
(which by itself is also without gravitative force) is 
placed in relation to it, gravitative force springs up 
in both particles. This also implies the creation 
of force and the impossible consequences already 
referred to. 

Again, if we consider the mutual gravitating ac- 
tion of one particle and of many, the particle A 
will attract the particle B at the distance of a mile 
with a certain degree of force ; it will attract a par- 
ticle C at the same distance of a mile with an equal 
power; if myriads of like particles be placed at 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 153 

the given distance, A will attract each with equal 
force ; and if other particles be accumulated around 
it within the sphere, two miles in diameter, it will 
attract them all with a force varying inversely with 
the square of the distance. How are we to con- 
ceive of this force growing up in A to a million- 
fold or more, and, if the surrounding particles be 
then removed, of its diminution in an equal degree, 
without admitting, according to the received defini- 
tion of gravitation, the facile generation and annihi- 
lation of force ? 

Or, if we take into consideration that property 
of matter which is, perhaps, its most characteristic 
property, that of inertia, we add still more to our 
difficulty. When two particles of matter, at cer- 
tain distances apart, attract each other and approach, 
each, through that inertia, will store up a certain 
amount of mechanical force, due to the force exert- 
ed. According to the doctrine of conservation, an 
equivalent portion of the cause of attraction must 
be thereby consumed ; and yet, according to the law 
of gravity, the attractive force is not diminished, 
but increased inversely to the square of the distance. 
Conversely, if mechanical force from without be 
used to separate the particles, this force is not stored 
up by inertia, but disappears ; and, when bodies 
have been moved to double the distance, the force 
is only one-fourth as great. 

If gravity is a property of matter, and possessed 
of its inertia, these results are truly inconceivable ; 



154: PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

and if we regard it, as has been urged, as an imma- 
terial principle, then either an equal inconceivability 
is believed by Science, or Science grants the funda- 
mental position of Religion— the existence and 
credibility of the immaterial. 

Or, take the modulatory theory of light — another 
of the greatest triumphs of Science — and what men- 
tal stumbling-blocks present themselves ! We are 
asked to believe that the infinitely greater bulk of 
matter in the universe is radically different from 
that portion of it which comes under the observa- 
tion of our senses, and makes up the globe we live 
on ; we are asked, that is, to violate the scientific 
principles of continuity, and of judging the un- 
known by the known. We are asked, again, to be- 
lieve that all the molecular and interstellar spaces, 
though they seem to be empty, are filled with a me- 
dium whose pressure, as before was noted, is cal- 
culated at seventeen billion pounds upon every 
square inch. Though thus immensely more elastic 
and solid than steel, it cannot be weighed nor seen, 
and we move through it without the least pressure 
from it. A gaseous medium, like air, strongly re- 
sists the flight throught it of any swiftly-moving 
body ; but the immense pressure of this medium has 
apparently little or no retarding effect either upon 
the larger bodies or the minute atoms constantly 
moving in it. The most that has ever been attrib- 
uted to it is a slight retardation of one or two of 
those most feeble and unsubstantial of bodies, the 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 155 

comets. But, if the ether behaves according to the 
universal laws of matter, it is impossible for bodies 
like the planets or the atoms to move themselves 
through iis dense substance without the expenditure 
of force in pushing it aside, and, as an inevitable 
result, a continual decrease of all cosmical motion. 
But if, nevertheless, we imagine, as bold physicists 
have done, that the ether is exempt from this law, 
and suppose that it is frictionless — planets and at- 
oms swinging in it without loss of motion — then we 
are involved in an equal difficulty ; for, as the ether 
takes no motion from the bodies moving in it, it 
consequently cannot impart nor transmit any motion 
to other bodies, and the whole use of the ether, and 
the necessity for supposing it as the medium for 
transmitting light and heat, disappears. 

Such are the inconceivabilities and contradictions 
which we plunge into in the study of jnst two spe- 
cial points in scientific investigation. If we were to 
examine, in turn, the various departments of physi- 
cal knowledge, we should find everywhere only 
similar results. 

Leaving particular difficulties, let us, then, in- 
quire into that which is the seat of all physical 
force, the subject of investigation in all depart- 
ments of Science — matter itself in general. It is 
matter and its qualities, we are told, that explain 
every thing. What, then, is this " matter ? " TVe 
generally understand by it the common substance 
of all bodies. Bodies have many qualities ; but 



156 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

the two qualities common to all bodies are volume 
and force. Considering the volume, or the extension 
of matter, the question arises, Is that divisible or in- 
divisible ? Down to the primary atom, it is univer- 
sally conceded to be divisible ; then comes a dilem- 
ma. If we say it is indivisible, that is something 
irreconcilable with its possessing volume or extent ; 
for, however infmitesimally small, as long as it has 
any volume, it must have an under and an upper, a 
right or a left, side between which a division is con- 
ceivable. If the atom is not divisible, it cannot lie 
extended, and hence cannot, by any aggregation of 
such unextended atoms, make an extended body. 
On the other hand, if we say, as Biichner does, that 
matter is divisible ad infinitum, then we can never 
arrive at what constitutes the reality of it ; for, as 
long as a thing is divisible, it is a compound, and 
a compound has no reality except that of its com- 
ponent parts ; and as no portion can be found, not 
composed of smaller parts, we shall never succeed 
in arriving at the ultimate element which alone can 
give reality to the aggregate. Moreover, as the pro- 
cess of division in search of the ultimate parts of 
matter has to be carried on beyond any finite limit, 
those ultimate parts must be less than any finite' ex- 
tension, and the former difficulty again occurs, How 
can they make up an extended aggregate \ ' 

Again, if we consider the question of the con- 

1 See Janet's " Materialism of the Present Age," tiansluted by 
Gustave Masson, p. 45. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 157 

timiity of matter, we fall into similar dilemmas. If 
matter be continuous throughout all space, atom in 
contact with atom, then all differences of density, 
all expansion or compression, all motion, even, ex- 
cept such as that of Descartes's supposed vortices, is 
impossible. On the other hand, if matter be dis- 
continuous, then we must either believe the incon- 
ceivability that matter can act where it is not, or we 
must suppose the force that passes through the void 
spaces of matter is not inseparable from matter : 
that is, we must grant the postulate of Religion — the 
existence and action of the immaterial. 

Taking up, next, the other main element in the 
idea of matter, its force, and endeavoring to fol- 
low it out to its logical result, the scientific analyst 
finds another dead-wall to bruise his head. Is mat- 
ter conceivably preexistent to force, and really inde- 
pendent of it, though practically revealing itself 
only through it % So some seem to think. But 
just imagine matter separate from force, and what 
remains of it ? Nothing but extension, as Janet ' 
has well pointed out. How, then, is matter in itself 
distinguished from space? How can a portion of 
matter be discriminated from the portion of space 
corresponding to it ? In no wise. Suppose, then, 
we take the other horn of the dilemma — say that 
force is the inherent quality of matter, not even in 
thought to be separated from it. The difference of 
a portion of matter from the space it occupies is 
1 " Materialism of the Present Day," p. 47. 



158 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

now plain. It differs in its force. But as this is 
the only tiling it differs in — as force is the only 
other factor besides extension always entering into 
it — is not this saying just what the opponents of 
materialism have always urged, namely, that matter 
really consists in simple force, located in space, and 
that the conception of a thing besides, called matter, 
was superfluous % " What do we know of an atom 
apart from its force % " is the pertinent question of 
Faraday. " You conceive a nucleus that may be 
called a, and you surround it with forces that may 
be called m. To my mind, your a or nucleus van- 
ishes, and substance consists in the energy of m" 

There are, it is true, perhaps the scientist will 
say, many things which we believe without yet un- 
derstanding them, but we look forward to in time. 
But the mysteries of religion, involving as they do 
the notions of infinity and self- existence, are abso- 
lute mysteries, not merely now incomprehensible, 
but from our constitution as finite beings always to 
remain so. I do not care here to discuss this ques- 
tion of the knowability or conceivability of the Infi- 
nite. Were I to do so, I believe that it Mould 
be easy to show that this supposed difficulty is 
entirely due to certain common confusions of thought 
and ambiguities of language. That which is incon- 
ceivable, because of its contradiction to the laws of 
thought, is certainly unbelievable. But that which 
is inconceivable only by its overpassing the limits 
of our powers is not, therefore, to be thought non- 



FAITHS OF 801 EN OF. 159 

existent. That which is unpicturable to the imagi- 
nation may yet be thinkable by the reason. That 
which we cannot know in essence we may yet know 
in its attributes and relations. That which we can- 
not know completely we may yet know not inade- 
quately and not untruly. The infinitude of an ob- 
ject in quantitative respects does not make it un- 
knowable in its qualitative attributes. 1 Spiritual 
things are not graded by magnitude, but by perfec- 
tion. 

If we bear these distinctions in mind, we shall 
not be troubled, I believe, by the alleged incon- 
ceivability of the infinite. But whether or not the 
infinite is conceivable or knowable, the fact remains 
— which I especially desire here to call attention 
to — that science continually employs the conception 
of the infinite, without hesitation, and builds with 
it many of its proudest structures. In mathematical 
calculations it is continually employed without dis- 
trust. In geometry and mechanics the idea of the 

1 A cylinder prolonged to infinity does not cease to be a cylinder 
or become unknowable. Infinite space is sjtill space, has the capaci- 
ty of holding extended objects, and the same three dimensions — 
length, breadth, and thickness. As Lewes justly says, laying it 
down as an important formula : " The existence of an unknown 
quantity does not necessarily disturb the accuracy of calculations 
founded on the known functions of the quantity." 

Thus, to give his illustration, although we may be unable to an- 
swer the question, " What is the value of 1 x added to 5 x? " so 
long as x remains without an assigned or assignable value, we are 
absolutely certain that the result will be 12 x, whatever value x may 
have. 



1G0 PHYSICAL A XT) RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

infinite plays an indispensable vole. The concep- 
tions of the line, the circle, and the sphere, are in- 
conceivable except through conceptions of the in- 
finitely small. So in mechanics, the passage from 
the axioms of uniform motion to other forms of 
motion is made by the assumption of uniform mo- 
tion through infinitesimal intervals. Astronomy 
and geology, on the other hand, lead us to the cor- 
relative infinitude, the infinitely large. As the tele- 
scope penetrates into space it brings to us inevitably 
the question, "Is there a limit anywhere to space?'' 
That there should be a limit to space, a boundary 
beyond which there should be no opportunity for 
existence, is certainly unthinkable; but, if so, we 
must accept the infinity of space with whatever in- 
conceivableness properly belongs to it. As the geol- 
ogist traces back the history of the world, lie runs 
athwart similar dilemmas attaching to time and 
matter. It is unthinkable that time should have a 
limit beyond which there would be no possibility of 
duration or succession. But if not, then infinite 
time, with its opposite inconceivability, must be ac- 
cepted. It is inconceivable that matter should have 
come into existence out of nothing. But the only 
alternative is the equal inconceivability, that matter 
lias existed from all eternity. If theologians, with 
their ideas of creation, are guilty of believing in the 
first members of these pairs of inconceivables, those 
who reject it must accept the second. In point of 
fact they are quite generally accepted by the scien- 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 161 

tific world. Mr. Proctor, in his lecture upon the 
"Infinities around us," 1 bears testimony to the ac- 
ceptance by the astronomer of infinity of power, 
infinity of space, and infinity of time in the uni- 
verse. Especially do those who belong to the ma- 
terialistic school, and find the ideas of theism incon- 
ceivable, make without scruple the most confident 
affirmations of infinity. Strauss, 2 for example, de- 
clares that, " if we contemplate the universe as a 
whole, there never has been a time when it did not 
exist, .... the cosmos itself, the sum total of in- 
finite worlds in all stages of growth and decay, 
abode eternally unchanged, in the constancy of its 
absolute energy, amid the everlasting revolution and 
mutation of things." Yogt and Biichner 3 lay down, 
as fundamental principles of their system, the eter- 
nity of matter and the immortality of force. 

Prof. Haeckel, of Jena, whose book, " Generelle 
Morphologie der Organismen," has been called " the 
Bible of Darwinism," says of the theory of creation 
(book ii., chapter vi., sec. 2): "The acceptation of 
this is quite incompatible with one of the first and 
chiefest of Nature's laws, one, indeed, universally 
acknowledged — namely, with the great law that all 
matter is eternal." 

Even Herbert Spencer falls into the same pit. 
Though he has branded all ideas which involve infi- 

1 Tribune Extra, No. 15. 

2 "The Old Faith and the New," pp. 1*73, Hi, American edition. 
8 See " Force and Matter," chapters ii. and iii, 



162 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

nite self -existence as " pseudo-ideas," and consequent- 
ly condemned all forms of theism, pantheism, and 
materialism, as inevitably involving such inconceiva- 
bilities, 1 no sooner has he put theology, as he thinks, 
hors de combat, and gone on to his positive scientilic 
construction, than he tells us that matter was both 
uncreated and is indestructible, and that force al- 
ways persists in unchanged quantity, 3 ideas neces- 
sarily involving infinite duration both in the past 
and in the future. Yet if the infinite is an incon- 
ceivable thing, a pseudo-idea, a symbolic conception 
of the illegitimate order, what saves these scientific 
conceptions from vitiation by it ? When the wariest 
thinker is driven by continual dilemmas into accept- 
ing inconceivability either on one side or the other, 
" why then," as Proctor asks, " dismiss the idea of 
a God merely because he is beyond our powers 
of conception ? " The principle on which religion 
reasons up to the infinite is not different from that 
employed by the mathematician, the geometer, or 
the astronomer, for the same purpose. It is, in fact, 
the same, the peculiar and fundamental conception 
of a limit, "the use of which," in proving the 
propositions of the higher geometry, Whewell says, 
" cannot be superseded by any combination of hy- 
potheses and definitions." 

" This principle of a limit," continues Whewell, 
" leads to all the results which form the subject of 

1 "First Principles," Part I., chapters ii. and iv. 

2 Ibid., Part II., chapters iv. and vi. 



FAITHS OF SCIENCE. 163 

the higher mathematics, whether proved by the con- 
sideration of evanescent triangles, by the processes 
of the differential calculus, or in any other way." 
In fact it is " when such processes as Newton de- 
duced from the conception of a limit are represented 
by general algebraical symbols, instead of geomet- 
rical diagrams," that " we have then before us the 
method of fluxions, or the differential calculus, a 
method of treating mathematical problems justly 
considered as the principal weapon by which the 
splendid triumphs of modern mathematics have been 
achieved." * 

The axiom which rules in all these processes is 
simply that " what is true up to a limit is true at 
that limit." Applying this to the limit of infinity, 
it gives us the rule that what is true throughout all 
finite grades, up to the iufinite, is true at the infi- 
nite. What better vindication from science could 
theology desire for its constant claim that the qual- 
ities of justice, love, wisdom, and holiness, mani- 
fested throughout the finite and phenomenal scale, 
shining out the more clearly the higher the grade of 
being, must exist in the infinite reality above and 
behind the finite phenomena ; and that, moreover, 
this infinite justice, love, and holiness, is not per- 
haps radically different from its finite manifesta- 
tions, but, however immensely greater and more 
perfect, is essentially the same ? 

1 Whewell's "History of Scientific Ideas," vol. L, pp. 152, 153. 



164 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. THEIR UNCERTAINTY, INEXACT- 
NESS, AND VARIABILITY. 

There is still one other difference often insisted 
upon as justifying a difference in the comparative 
credit given to science and religion — the difference 
of results. 

Though religion may perhaps use the same meth- 
ods as science and aim at no more transcendental 
objects, yet, in practice, it is charged that she is never 
able to reach the exactness and the certainty for 
which science is distinguished. When science once 
puts her foot down, she never draws back. The 
received truths and forms of religion, on the other 
hand, are continually shifting. Its early phases 
were often gross and full of errors. Neither moral- 
ity nor faith has any absolute standard, any unre- 
treating course. 

Again I answer, these are charges to which 
science as well as religion lies open. No difference 
exists here sufficient to justify contempt or disregard 
for religion on the part of scientific men, or those 
who accept current scientific doctrines and results. 

No instance of sense observation is entirely ex- 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 165 

em.pt from the possibility of error or delusion. As 
lias been already noticed, every sense lias its limits, 
beyond which it fails either to discriminate or to 
perceive at all. Unusual conditions of observation 
cause mistakes in perception. Cross the fingers, and, 
while the eyes are shut, put a cherry between the sides 
usually separated, and two cherries, instead of one 
cherry, are felt. A torch whirled rapidly, or drops of 
water falling swiftly, seem to form a continuous line, 
the separate impressions running into each other. 
Without surveying the particular defects of all the 
senses, it will be sufficient to look at that sense 
which is most wonderful and perfect — vision. Its 
perfection is not absolute, but merely practical. 

Prof. Helmholtz, in his lecture on " The Recent 
Progress of the Theory of Vision," gives a cata- 
logue of some of the principal defects of the eye : 

1. Chromatic aberration. 

2. Spherical aberration and defective centring 
of the cornea and lens, together with the first de- 
fect, producing the imperfection known as astig- 
matism. 

3. Irregular radiation around the images of illu- 
minated points. 

Helmholtz considers these defects so grave that 
he declares that " it is not too much to say that, if 
an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which 
had all these defects, I should think myself quite 
justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest 
terms, and giving him back his instrument." 



166 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

He then goes on to other faults : 

4. Defective transparency. 

5. Floating corpuscles (muscce volitantes). 

6. The blind spot, with other gaps in the field 
of vision. 

But this is not all. "The inaccuracies and im- 
perfections of the eye, as an optical instrument, 
and those which belong to the image on the retina, 
now appear insignificant in comparison with the in- 
congruities which we have met with in the field of 
sensation. One might almost believe that Nature 
had here contradicted herself on purpose, in order 
to destroy any dream of a preexisting harmony 
between the outer and the inner world. . . . 

" In general, then, light, which consists of undu- 
lations of different wave-lengths, produces different 
impressions upon our eye, namely, those of different 
colors. But the number of lines which we can recog- 
nize is much smaller than that of the various possible 
combinations of rays with different wave-lengths 
which external objects can convey to our eyes. The 
retina cannot distinguish between the white which is 
produced by the union of scarlet and bluish-green 
light, and that which is composed of yellowish-green 
and violet, or of yellow and ultra-marine blue, or of 
red, green, and violet, or of all the colors of the spec- 
trum united. All these combinations appear iden- 
tically as white, and yet, from a physical point of 
view, they are very different." 

Again, the eye cannot correctly estimate the com- 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 16? 

parative brightness of two luminous bodies which 
differ very much in brilliancy, for we know that the 
eye is constantly adjusting itself to the intensity of 
the light received, and thus admits more or less light 
according to circumstances. The moon, so bright 
at night, is pale and nearly imperceptible while the 
eye is yet affected by the vastly more powerful light 
of day. For this reason it is difficult to estimate 
any change in the form or comparative brightness 
of nebulae, or of the zodiacal light. The appear- 
ance depends greatly on the varying darkness of the 
night and the keenness of sight of the observer, or 
the freshness or fatigue of the eye. In judging of 
colors, again, there is a difficulty arising from the 
fact that light of a given color tends to dull the 
sensibility of the eye for light of the same color. 

No one has given a more compact catalogue of 
ways in which the senses are found insufficient than 
Lord Bacon in the " Novum Organum." " Things 
escape the senses," he says, " because the object is 
not sufficient in quantity to strike the senses, as all 
minute bodies ; because the percussion of the body 
is too great to be endured by the senses, as the 
form of the sun, when looking directly at it in mid- 
day ; because the time is not proportionate to actuate 
the sense, as the motion of a bullet in the air, or 
the quick, circular motions of a firebrand which are 
too fast, or the hour-hand of a common clock, which 
is too slow ; from the distance of the object as to 
place, as the size of the celestial bodies, and the 



168 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

size and nature of all distant bodies ; from prepos- 
session by another object, as one powerful smell 
renders other smells in the same room impercepti- 
ble ; from the interruption of opposing bodies, as 
the internal parts of animals ; and because the ob- 
ject is unfit to make an impression upon the sense, 
as the air, or the invisible or untangible spirit which 
is included in every living body." 

Moreover, besides these bodily hinderances to 
correct observation, there are the mental hinderances. 
Even when the utmost care is used in observing and 
recording, tendencies to error exist. Almost every 
observer has a bias that affects, more or less, his ob- 
servations. The mind of man, as Bacon said, is an 
uneven mirror, and does not reflect the events of 
Nature without distortion. 

Again, there may be circumstances connected 
with the object observed which may tend to dis- 
tort it or cause us to observe it one-sidedly. There 
is always, for example, a prevailing fallacy, that our 
ancestors built more strongly than we do, arising 
from the fact that the more fragile structures have 
long since melted away. Prof. De Morgan has 
mentioned four ways in which one event may seem 
to follow, or be connected with another, without 
really being so. 1 

In consequence of these hinderances and pitfalls, 
the various sciences will lack more or less of the 
certainty commonly attributed to them. None have 

1 See "Essay on Probabilities," Cabinet Cyclopaedia, p. 121. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 169 

done more to show this than the men of science 
themselves. Dr. W. B. Carpenter, speaking of the 
general belief that the scientific interpretation of 
Nature represents her not merely as she seems, but 
as she really is, says : " When, however, we care- 
fully examine the foundation of that assurance, we 
find reason to distrust its security, for it can be 
shown to be no less true of the scientific conception 
of Nature than it is of the artistic or poetic that it 
is a representation framed by the mind itself out of 
the material supplied by the impressions which ex- 
ternal objects make upon the senses, so that to each 
man of science Nature is what he individually be- 
lieves her to be." Prof. Kingdon Clifford, in his 
lecture upon the " Aims and Instruments of Scien- 
tific Thought," delivered before the British Asso- 
ciation at Brighton, 1S72, discusses at considerable 
length the question, " "What do we mean when we 
say that the uniformity of Nature is exact ? " and 
concludes that we mean by it " no more than this, 
that we are able to state general rules which are far 
more exact than direct experiment, and which apply 
to all cases that we are at present likely to come 
across." 

Not only in general do scientific men admit the 
imperfections and inexactitude of science, but, in 
particular. Dr. Paget, in mentioning the advantages 
of the study of physiology, mentions as one of them, 
the fact that it is " a very uncertain and incomplete 
science," well adapted, therefore, he thinks, to disa- 



170 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

buse young men of the too prevalent idea that a 
plain yes or no can be answered to every question 
that can be plainly asked, and that every thing thus 
answered is a settled thing, and to be maintained as a 
point of conscience. Herbert Spencer has recently 
shown, in his volume on the " Study of Sociology," 
the uncertainties that Beset social science. The 
phenomena to be studied here, he states, are not of a 
directly perceptible kind, to be examined by scientific 
instruments, like those of astronomy or chemistry, 
nor are they to be recognized by introspection, like 
the phenomena of psychology- The disturbance of 
the various emotions and prejudices of the observers, 
the political, educational, patriotic, theological, and 
class biases, add to the difficulty. Thirdly, a danger 
still more subtile and difficult to escape from arises 
from the exceptional position of the observer, who 
is inevitably himself a part of the very aggregate 
that he studies, and cannot divest himself of the 
personal interests and partial predispositions arising 
therefrom. 

In regard to political economy, what Daniel 
Webster said in 1830 is still, in great measure, ap- 
plicable. " For my part," says Webster, " though 
I like investigation of political questions, I give up 
what is called the ' science of political economy.' 
There is no such science. There are no rules on 
the subject so fixed and invariable as that their ag- 
gregate constitutes a science. I believe I have re- 
cently run over twenty volumes, and from the whole, 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 171 

if I should pick out with one hand all the mere 
truisms, and with the other all the doubtful propo- 
sitions, little would be left." Although since then 
we have had the able and laborious investigations 
of Mill, Bastiat, and Carey, nevertheless, I believe 
there is little more general agreement among politi- 
cal economists, and few more invariable rules that 
are unanimously accepted. 

Even the most exact of sciences, astronomy, is 
far from perfectly exact. "Many persons," says 
Jevons, 1 "may be misled by the expression exact 
science, and may think that the knowledge acquired 
by scientific methods admits of our reaching abso- 
lutely true laws, exact to the last degree. . . . The 
very satisfactory degree of accuracy attained in the 
science of astronomy gives a certain plausibility to 
erroneous notions of this kind. . . . Kepler's laws 
are not proved, if by proof we mean certain demon- 
stration of their exact truth. Even if Ave could ob- 
serve the motions of a planet of a perfect globular 
shape, free from all perturbing or retarding forces, 
we could never perfectly prove that it moved in an 
ellipse. To prove the elliptical form we should have 
to measure infinitely small angles and infinitely small 
fractions of a second; we should have to perform 
impossibilities. . . . But, secondly, as a matter of 
fact, no planet does move in a perfect ellipse or 
manifest the truth of Kepler's laws exactly. . . . 
The mutual perturbations of the planets distort the 

1 Chapter xxi. 



172 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

elliptical paths. Those laws, again, hold true only 
of infinitely small planetary bodies, and, when two 
great globes like the sun and Jupiter attract each 
other, the law must be modified. . . . Even at the 
present day discrepancies exist between the observed 
dimensions of the planets' orbits and their theoretical 
magnitudes, after making allowance for all disturbing 
causes. 1 Nothing, in fact, is more certain in scientific 
method than that approximate coincidence can alone 
be expected. In the measurement of continuous 
quantity, perfect correspondence must be purely ac- 
cidental, and should give rise to suspicion rather than 
to satisfaction." 2 

It is from measurement that the great certainty 
of science, where it is certain, comes. " Obviously," 
says Herbert Spencer, 8 " it is this reduction of the 
sensible phenomena it represents to relations of 
magnitude which gives to any division of knowledge 
its especially scientific character." As Davy said, 
"Nothing tends so much to the advancement of 
knowledge as the application of a new instrument." 
But it is only the simpler things that are open to 
even approximate measurement. After two centu- 
ries of labor the most eminent mathematical talent 
has succeeded in calculating the mutual effect of 
three bodies upon each other under the single force 
of gravity only approxvmativel/y. Astronomers have 

1 See Lockyer's "Lessons in Elementary Astronomy." 

2 " Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 13. 
8 "Recent Discussions," p. 162. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 173 

not even attempted the general problem of the simul- 
taneous attractions of four, five, six, or more bodies, 
resolving the general problem into so many different 
problems of three bodies. But an atom of a single 
substance, says Jevons, 1 " is probably a vastly more 
complicated system than that of the planets and 
then- satellites. A compound atom perhaps may be 
compared with a stellar system, each star a minor 
system in itself. The smallest particle of solid 
substance will consist of a vast number of such stel- 
lar systems, united in regular order, each bounded 
by the other, communicating with it in some man- 
ner, yet wholly incomprehensible. . . . There is 
every reason to believe that each constituent of a 
chemical atom must go through an orbit in the mill- 
ionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it 
successively or simultaneously is under the influence 
of many other constituents, or possibly comes into 
collision with them. It is, I apprehend, no exag- 
geration to say that mathematicians have scarcely a 
notion of the way in which they could successfully 
attack so difficult a problem of forces and motions. 
Each of these particles is forever solving differential 
equations, which, if written out in full, might per- 
haps belt the earth, as Sir John Herschel has beau- 
tifully remarked." 

In the simplest natural phenomena, therefore, 
there will always be numberless factors whose exact 
influence can never be ascertained. "Until we 

1 "Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 458. 



174 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

know thoroughly the nature of matter, and the 
forces which produce its motions," say Thomson and 
Tait, 1 " it will be utterly impossible to submit to 
mathematical reasoning the exact conditions of any 
physical question." The approximate solutions 
which are reached " are attained by a species of ab- 
straction or rather limitation of the data, and thus 
the infinite series of forces really acting may be left 
out of consideration." In science, then, the problems 
solved do not reproduce the actual order in its real 
complexity, and the laws and explanations are more 
or less hypothetical, and apply to nothing which we 
see or feel. Even physical astronomy, where the 
nearest approximation to actual conditions is found, 
is full of assumptions and neglect of numberless dis- 
crepancies. It is assumed in it that the other mill- 
ions of existing systems exert no perturbing influ- 
ence on our system ; that the planets are perfect 
ellipsoids with absolutely smooth surfaces and homo- 
geneous interiors — assumptions, part of them, cer- 
tainly untrue, as every hill and mountain show, and 
the rest very doubtful. In regard to other branches 
of science the same thing is true. Scientific in- 
vestigators speak and calculate about homogeneous 
substances, perfect fluids and gases, inflexible bars, 
points at which the gravity of bodies is concentrated, 
uniform spheres, etc. ; but in reality there are no 
such things in Nature. Take one of the simplest 
problems in mechanics, the use of a crowbar to raise 
1 " Natural Philosophy," vol. i., p. 387. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 175 

a heavy stone, and we shall find, as Thomson and 
Tait have pointed out, that we neglect far more 
than we observe. 1 If we suppose the bar to be quite 
rigid, the fulcrum and stone perfectly hard, and the 
points of contact real points, we might give the true 
relation of the forces. But, in reality, the bar will 
bend, the stone may yield a trifle, and the points of 
contact are not absolute points, and the extension 
and compression of the different parts involve us in 
difficulties which no mathematics can cope with. In 
a practical point of view, these effects are generally 
inappreciable; but, compared with absolute exacti- 
tude, there will always remain gaps not to be closed 
up. 

Especially when we would know any of the 
higher orders of existence, there must be uncertainty 
in our knowledge. The inorganic is somewhat sub- 
jectible to measure, but, when we enter the realm of 
the vital or the mental, we come to that Avhich can 
no longer be put into feet and inches, pounds and 
ounces. "We cannot," as Dr. W. O. Johnson re- 
cently warned his medical brethren, " describe the 
commonest chemical change going on in the body. 
We cannot define the simplest of the vital pro- 
cesses." In the words of the chemist Berthollet^ 
" We know nothing of any one of them thoroughly, 
since a perfect knowledge of any one of them in- 
volves a perfect knowledge of all the laws and forces 
which continue to produce it." What shall we say, 
1 " Treatise on Natural Philosophy," vol. i., p. 337, etc. 



176 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

then, of the higher problems of the intellectual and 
spiritual order? Here, Science finds herself in a 
realm of mystery. What measuring-rod can science 
put to the sense of beauty? By what weight-stand- 
ard can it estimate the quantitative energy of a 
thought? By what calculus can right and wrong be 
reduced to foot-pounds ? By what mural astronomy 
shall the track of free-will be predicted, and the 
infinite complications and ever-changing equilibra 
tions of society be foretold ? 

" In human affairs, then," as Jevons well says, 1 
" the real application of scientific method is out of 
the question." 

Or take the measures with which science reaches 
its greatest precision — a precision oftentimes really 
marvelous. In comparison with these standards, 
the variability of conscience is pointed out, and the 
shif tings of moral judgment in different ages and 
peoples are declared to disprove the existence of any 
authoritative moral faculty, or at least to disprove 
the existence of any fixed standard of right and 
wrong. But is science really any better off in these 
respects? Has it any absolute standard measure, 
either of direction, time, weight, or extension, any 
more than religion of morality or faith ? Not a bit. 
All the instruments with which scientific men per 
form their measurements are more or less faulty. 
A surface of mercury is supposed to be perfectly 
plane, but even in the breadth of five inches there is 

1 Vol. ii., p. 460. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 177 

a calculable divergence from a true plane of about 
a ten-million tli part of an inch. A plumb-line is 
assumed to be perfectly vertical, but, owing to the 
attractions of mountains and other inequalities on 
the earth's surface, this is never absolutely true, and 
in extensive surveys has to be approximatively cor- 
rected. In measuring time, the pendulum, admi- 
rable as it is, is not absolutely invariable. The 
slightest change in the form or weight of the pen- 
dulum, such as changes of temperature, the slightest 
corrosion of any part, or the most minute displace- 
ment of the point of suspension, readily cause, 
would falsify the result. 

The best unit of time is the rotation of a freely- 
moving body. But when we inquire where the 
freely-moving body is, "no satisfactory answer," 
says Jevons, " can be given." Practically, the ro- 
tating globe is sufficiently accurate, and no long 
time has passed since astronomers thought it im- 
possible to detect any inequality in its movement ; 
but it is now known that the friction of tidal 
waves and the radiation of heat into space has 
slightly decreased the rapidity of the earth's motion. 
The moon's motion round the earth and the earth's 
motion round the sun form the next best measure 
of time. But these also are subject to disturb- 
ances from other planets or heavenly bodies, and 
from the loss of energy through slight resistances 
met in their passage through space. "We thus," 
says Jevons, "appear to be devoid of any hope 



1Y8 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

of establishing a sure standard of the efflux of 
time." 

Turning to space measurements, we tind it 
equally difficult to obtain any invariable standard. 

To construct or preserve an unchangeable stand- 
ard bar is something which is not possible, or at 
least cannot be shown to be possible. Passing over 
the practical difficulty of defining the ends of the 
standard length with sufficient accuracy, we have no 
means of proving that the substance of the bar does 
not contract or expand with age or temperature. It 
is certain that many rigid and invariable substances 
do change in dimensions both from age and tempera- 
ture. If we take, as our unit, a certain fraction of 
the earth's circumference, this likewise is exposed 
to uncertainty from possible changes in the earth's 
magnitude and the difficulty of measuring the earth 
with sufficient accuracy. Or, lastly, if we take as a 
standard the length of a seconds pendulum, we 
must assume that the attraction of gravity at a 
given point, and the length of a sidereal day, remain 
entirely unchanged, neither assumption, as far as we 
can judge, being absolutely correct. 

Similar difficulties beset attempts to obtain un- 
changeable weights or standards of density, mass, 
motion, or heat. Besides the disturbing conditions 
known, but impossible sufficiently to guard against, 
vitiating all these standards, there are also conditions 
which it is always possible may exist unsuspected. 

The fact is, that the realm of experience, in- 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 179 

stead of being the favored seat of exact truth, can 
never give us any absolute certainty. In the words 
of Judge Stallo, at the conclusion of his remark- 
able articles on the " Primary Concepts of Sci- 
ence," 1 " there is no absolute system of coordinates 
in space to which the positions of bodies and their 
changes can be referred ; and there is neither an 
absolute measure of quantity, nor an absolute stand- 
ard of quality. There is no physical constant" 
No absolute physical standard is even conceivable. 
The only absolute certainty is in the realm of ideas 
— of intuitions. As far as both science and religion 
are founded on them, they possess absolute cer- 
tainty. As far as they are experimental, they par- 
take more or less of the- same relative validity and 
absolute uncertainty. 

Whenever knowledge is destitute of absolute 
certainty, its history will represent a series of 
changes, whereby the absolute truth is more and 
more approximated. This is notably the case with 
religion. The rude phases which first it took on, 
the changes and transformations through which it 
has passed, have been common targets for com- 
ments by no means complimentary. But it is the 
same with science. Nothing is more contrary to 
the whole spirit of modern science, more absurd, 
indeed, to a modern intellect, than some of the sci- 
entific theories of Bacon. Kepler was full of chi- 
merical notions,, and we know from his own writ- 
1 Popular Science Monthly, December, lS^. 



180 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ings the numerous errors into which he fell. Ac- 
cording to one of his earlier scientific works, the 
sun, stars, and planets,, were typical of the Trinity, 
and God distributed the planets in space in accord- 
ance with the regular polyhedrons, etc. He grave- 
ly held that there could not be more than six plan- 
ets because there were not more than five regular 
solids. His famous laws were the one true discov- 
ery among a score of vain and groundless saccula- 
tions, and, even in the investigations that led him to 
these, he proceeded upon the false supposition that 
the sun's motion was requisite to keep up the mo- 
tion of the planets, as well as to deflect and modify 
it. Even the acute genius of Huyghens did not 
prevent him from inferring that but one satellite 
could belong to Saturn, because, with those of Jupi- 
ter and the earth, it made up the perfect number of 
six. Before the time of Torricelli, physicists be- 
lieved that Nature abhorred a vacuum, and this was 
the reason why water rose in a pump ; but when 
Torricelli pointed out the fact that water would not 
rise more than thirty-three feet in a pump, nor mer- 
cury more than thirty inches, and thus above these 
points Nature had no objections to any vacuum, an- 
other cause had to be sought. 

Tan Helmont, who is immortalized by the study 
of the gases, believed that each part of the body 
had an archseus or special spiritual agent, subordi- 
nate to the principal archseus, which he located in 
the stomach, the seat also assigned by him to the 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 181 

intellect. The distinguished Yesalius, who, by his 
careful dissections, overthrew the hitherto unchal- 
lenged system of Galen, and first put anatomy upon 
a scientific foundation, did not dream of disputing 
that authority concerning the distribution of the 
blood, and therefore imagined that it distilled 
through the pores of the unbroken and imperme- 
able portion, and steadily denied the existence of 
valves in the veins, although others had already ob- 
served them. 

In modern times similar mistakes have been re- 
peatedly made. The history of chemistry shows 
how substances have been confounded with one an- 
other. " Thus strontia," says Jevons, 1 " was never 
discriminated from baryta till Klaproth and Haiiy 
detected differences between some of their proper- 
ties. There is now no doubt that the recently-dis- 
covered substances, caesium and rubidium, were 
long mistaken for potassium. The history of sci- 
ence is the history of the constant correction of ear- 
lier experimenters by later, causes of error which 
afterward are most apparent being at first over- 
looked. The Arabian astronomers determined the 
meridian by taking the middle point between the 
places of the sun when at equal altitudes on the 
same day. They neglected the fact that the sun 
has its own motion among the stars in the interven- 
ing time. Newton thought that the mutual disturb- 
ances of most of the planets might be disregarded. 

1 " Principles," vol i, p. 2*73. 



182 PHYSICAL AND, RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

The expansion of quicksilver was long used as the 
measure of temperature, in ignorance of the fact 
that the rate of expansion increases with the tem- 
perature. Romford, in his first experiment leading 
to a determination of the mechanical equivalent of 
heat, disregarded the heat absorbed by the box con- 
taining the water heated. 1 Lavoisier's ideas con- 
cerning the constitution of acids have received a 
complete refutation. He named oxygen the acid- 
generator because he believed that all acids were 
compounds of oxygen, a generalization which fur- 
ther investigations disproved. Berzelius's theory 
of the dual formation of chemical compounds has 
met a similar fate. On its ruins has risen the New 
Chemistry. The simple splitting and pairing the- 
ory has been abandoned, and we are becoming fa- 
miliar with the idea of unitary structure, molecular 
types, and transformations by substitutions and re- 
placements, in which the arrangement of the ele- 
ments is of as much consequence as the question 
which they are. 

This succession of various theories is a phenom- 
enon that cannot fail to strike him who studies 
the progress of scientific ideas as something com- 
mon to all branches of physical investigation. In 
the early days of geology fossils were looked upon 
as the results of the fermentation of matter, or 
of terrestrial exhalations, or were supposed to be 
mere earthy concretions or sports of matter. When, 

1 Jevons, " Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 86. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 183 

after two centuries of discussion, the belief that 
they were the remains of fossils gained sway, it 
was still held that the ISToachian Deluge was the 
cause of all the past changes on the earth's surface. 
Discovery after discovery worked the refutation 
of this idea. Still all geologic changes were looked 
upon as sudden, of the nature of catastrophes : one 
school, the Plutonists, regarding fire as the great 
agent of all rock-formations ; the other school, the 
Neptunists, holding that even the so-called igneous 
rocks were chemical precipitates from the waters. 
In the present century these theories have given 
way to the Uniformitarian theory, which refers 
the greatest geological changes to the agency of 
forces still in action, and this is now giving way 
to the Evolution theory. Recent discoveries, such 
as the finding of worked flints lying in strata, and 
in connection with extinct mammalia, hitherto sup- 
posed to be anterior to man ; the discovery of the 
Eozoon in the Lauren tian rocks of Canada ; and 
especially the revelations made by the dredging ex- 
peditions, of the present contemporaneous formation 
of the chalk and lime deposits hitherto supposed to 
indicate different geologic epochs — have worked al- 
most a revolution in geology. The strata of the 
earth's crust are hardly more various and irregular 
than the diverse theories in regard to their origin 
and history that from generation to generation have 
prevailed So in the history of biology. Passing 
by the mystical school, with - its doctrines of sig- 



184 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

natures and astrological fancies, as undeserving the 
name of even primitive science, we have the Iatro- 
chemical school of the seventeenth century, in which 
the reactions of the acid and alkali, and various 
other chemical principles and processes, explained 
every thing ; then, in the first half of the eigh- 
teenth century, the mechanical school of Borelli, 
and the corpuscular hypothesis of Descartes, fol- 
lowed by the Yital Fluid theory, in which all the 
peculiar functions of life are supposed to depend 
upon a subtile ethereal substance diffused through 
the organism, this again yielding to the two rival the- 
ories of modern physiology, the Psychical and the 
Physical theories ; one maintaining an immaterial 
vital principle, the other that the processes of life 
are but transformations of the various physical 
forces. 1 

Electricity similarly was first spoken of as a 
fluid, then as a force, now as an energy or motion 
readily converted into thermal, molar, or molecular 
motion of various kinds. To explain heat we have 
had the phlogistic, the caloric, and now the molecu- 
lar motion theory. For light, we have had the 
Emission and the Undulatory theories ; for the 
heavens, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican sys- 
tems ; in regard to forces, the Cartesian and the 
Newtonian conceptions. In the presence of the 
new dynamics, the new botany, the new chemistry 
of to-day, in the presence especially of those theo- 

1 Whewell's " History of Scientific Ideas," book ix , chap. ii. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS. 1S5 

ries most revolutionary to all scientific ideas — the 
natural selection and the evolution hypotheses — the 
natural philosopher of fifty years ago would feel 
that there was nothing for him to do but to learn 
his science over again, and learn it all differently. 
Great as have been the theologic changes in the last 
century, they are more than matched by the sniff- 
ings of scientific theory. If in former times the 
best men of science have made as many errors as it 
is now proved that they have, is it likely that the 
dicta of the present school of scientists are to re- 
main forever unshaken ? If the past errors, if the 
present possibility of error in some things, do not 
interfere, nevertheless, with the substantial trust- 
worthiness and validity of present science, why 
should they with the trustworthiness and validity 
of rehgion % 



18C PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 



CHAPTER VII. 

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS OF RELIGION. 

In the previous chapters I endeavored to show 
that, if the foundations of religion are insecure, 
those of science, also, for the same reasons and in 
the same way, are uncertain. Not only can this 
negative exposition be made, but positively it can 
be shown that religion has valid evidences similar to 
those of science. Physical investigation can claim 
no monopoly of scientific method ; for, as Herbert 
Spencer says, it is nothing different from ordinary 
reasoning, but simply the processes of common- 
sense carried out with precision. Let us consider, 
then, the 

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION OF RELIGION. 

The starting-point of all science is in the obser- 
vation of Nature. The various senses, sight, hear- 
ing, smell, touch, perceive various objects — star, 
rock, water, plant, animal ; and notice their varied 
qualities, heat and cold, hardness, softness, per- 
fumes, sounds, forms, etc. These are compared ; 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 187 

their likenesses and differences noted. Then clas- 
sifications are formed — families, species, substances, 
forces, laws — and, as the result of these inductions, 
general propositions are laid down, the general prin- 
ciple ruling in this inductive process being to classify 
together the like things, separating them from the 
unlike, and to interpret the unknown by the known, 
not vice versa. 

Now, the course of religious thought ^has been 
the same. It may not . have been aware that it 
started with observation, and proceeded by induc- 
tion, any more than M. Jourdain knew that he 
talked prose. It may even have claimed to reach 
its knowledge entirely through other sources. Nev- 
ertheless, like science, its work has been, for the 
most part, the interpretation of the facts of Nature, 
only it has taken them up with other aim, and pur- 
sued them in another direction. Mr. Huxley him- 
self, urging upon clergymen the study of science, 
points this out. " The theories of religion," he 
says, " like all other theories, are professedly based 
upon matters of fact." * 

If we examine even the rudest forms of reli- 
gion, we shall find their genesis, as Mr. Tylor says/ 
in " the plain evidence of men's senses, as inter- 
preted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive 
philosophy." Mr. Tylor has explained, at length, 
the various processes and reasonings which suggest 

1 " Lay Sermons," p. 60. 

2 " Primitive Culture," p. 38V. 



188 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

to the savage the doctrine of spiritual beings. To 
sum them up, they are as follows : Thinking men, 
at a low level of culture, observing the strange phe- 
nomena of sleep, trance, dreams, disease, death, are 
deeply impressed by them, and seek to account for 
them. What makes the difference between a live 
and a dead body — a conscious and an unconscious 
man ? What are these human shapes which appear 
in visions ? Looking at these marvelous facts, the 
ancient savage philosophers made the induction of 
what we may call an apparitional soul, or ghost-soul 
— an unsubstantial human image or shadow — the 
cause of life and thought, independently possessing 
the personal consciousness and volition of its corpo- 
real owner, past or present, and able to leave the 
body and flash swiftly from place to place. 

This conception of spiritual beings as the causes 
of life and motion once attained to, two great pos- 
tulates of religion were natural inferences from it. 
As the soul or spiritual being was able to leave the 
body during life, and appeared in dreams after 
death, it was not involved in the destruction of the 
body at death, but continued to live on. 

This was enough to establish for them the doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul. Then, as they 
looked upon the mighty marvels of earth and sky, 
so full of awe to primitive man, the grand concep- 
tion of Divine Beings was reached. 

The blazing sun which warmed and lighted 
man ; the cloud which swallowed up the sun in the 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 189 

midst of its career, and shot its lightning-bolts upon 
the earth ; the sea which now smiled so sweetly, and 
now raved along the shore with tossing mane ; the 
bubbling fount, the fruitful earth, the wind, the 
mountain — here were powers which did not origi- 
nate with man himself, over which he could exer- 
cise no control nor foresight, which were mightier 
far than he. What is their nature ? Naturally he 
applied to the explanation of the unknown outward 
Nature the conception by which he had already ex- 
plained his own life and movements. As he him- 
self existed and executed his purposes and acted 
upon the world through the spiritual being or soul 
within him, so he believed that each celestial or 
earthly body was itself or had as its mover an inde- 
pendent living spiritual being. Accordingly, he 
offered to these spiritual beings worship, prayer, 
gifts, sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies of various 
kinds, such as he deemed would win their favor, 
mollify their wrath, or persuade them to effect his 
wishes. 

In the widening experience of man, the rude 
observations of early times have been made infinite- 
ly more full and exact. Further observation reveals 
many errors in the primitive animistic theories of 
human phenomena. Further observation shows Na- 
ture not to be ruled by numerous independent voli- 
tions, but to be under the government of a single 
uniform system of laws. The first crude theories 
of religious interpreters must, therefore, be laid 



190 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

aside. Theology has undergone many transforma- 
tions between those early fancies and its modern 
forms. Nevertheless, its starting-point and its meth- 
od to-day are the same, only carried out with more 
scientific rigor. Religion, with the help of science, 
whose aid is here invaluable, surveys the vast phe- 
nomena of the universe. It finds Nature not the 
same from all eternity, but ever changing. It finds 
these constant changes, however, directed by law. 
Every effect has some regular cause. Force is linked 
with force. Principle dovetails into principle. 
Creature is grouped with creature, forming an hier- 
archy of species, genus, order, and class. Thus the 
Kosmos discloses itself as a wonderful order. A 
luxuriant and excpiisite loveliness beams thence 
upon the eye. Whether the devout or the unde- 
vout survey Nature, the beauty which graces it, 
ranging in scale all the way from the majestic glory 
of Alpine scenery to the symmetry of a snow-flake's 
facets, or the microscopic chasings of a diatom, can- 
not be unadmired. Again, in the admirable corre- 
lation of structure to environment, and of organ to 
function, in the mutual interdependence of animal 
and vegetable life, in the continuous self-adjustments 
of part to part and change to change, in the ingen- 
ious contrivances which minister to the prospective 
harmony of Nature, a marvelous exhibition of the 
adaptation of means to ends greets the glance of 
the observer. In every creature, tokens of provi- 
dential impulses, stirring to activity, are revealed. 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 19] 

From the structureless germinal matter at the end 
of a placental tuft which spontaneously burrows 
into the surrounding pabulum to supply its want, 
or the jelly-like amoeba which pushes out portions 
of the living substance and extemporizes with them 
an organ to grasp its food, up to the insects which, 
impelled by the needs of the coming generation, 
build their rafts of eggs to hatch out after then- 
death, or the human infant seeking, untaught, the 
mother's breast, all living things are impelled un- 
consciously to do what is needed for the maintenance 
and preservation, not only of themselves, but of the 
race. Through all changes and events a continual 
progress from the more imperfect toward the more 
perfect, a finer finish in Nature's handiwork, a 
steady exaltation of faculty and power, a constant 
increase in all that can minister to the well-being 
or the happiness of living creatures, discloses it- 
self. A work on natural 'theology is a treasury 
of the most striking illustrations, out of the thou- 
sands that might be adduced, that witness to these 
facts. 

Then religion surveys the phenomena of human 
nature. It' finds there exalted powers and activi- 
ties by virtue of which the impressions on the 
senses, common to man with the brute, are given 
with him a higher significance. It observes the 
power of memory to retain and call up again the 
past; the power. of imagination to look forth into 
the future, fly in thought to other climes, or build be- 



102 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

fore the mind's eye ideal structures. It observes the 
faculties of judging and comparing, and the concep- 
tions of likeness, number, time, and space, through 
which the facts of the world are classified and in- 
terpreted.' It discovers intuitions, such as those of 
purpose, causation, and uniting law, by which the 
medley of events is reduced to an intelligible whole. 
It finds powers of abstraction and expression, by 
which man builds up the beautiful edifice of lan- 
guage and the solid masonries of logic. Unlike 
the bird or beast, man does not lie down in dull 
content. There is something in him that makes 
him dream of ideal excellence, fascinates him with 
every intimation of the infinite, draws him after 
the perfect. A divine disquietude fills him till he 
can realize them. The unalterable serenity which 
reigns elsewhere in Nature, in man gives place to 
the dramatic agitations of consciousness. For the 
rigid determinism, the iron fatality of the physical 
world, breaks off when we come to humanity, and 
another law appears — the law of freedom. Man 
finds that he enjoys the peculiar privilege of liberty 
of thought and liberty of will, that he has a power 
over Nature and over self, and that he can exercise 
it as he chooses. He labors, therefore, to make 
these conform to his wishes and conceptions, and 
minister to his delights. Knowledge of the world's 
order is in his hands only an instrument for act- 
ing upon it. He becomes, as it were, a second 
creator. He levels forests, he drains morasses, he 






POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 193 

tames and introduces this animal, lie banishes that, 
he transforms the nature of plant and fruit. From 
brute matter he draws forth the skillful tool and 
the industrious, almost intelligent, machine, and 
multiplies infinitely his force. On the frescoed 
wall he fastens his glowing vision of beauty. In 
woven harmonies he /utters his unspeakable aspira- 
tions and infinite longings. In the forest-like arch- 
es of the cathedral he rears the enduring symbol of 
his reverence and awe for the divine. He looks 
upon the body of every fellow-man while living as 
animated by a being peculiarly sacred and vital; 
and, when the body is laid in the ground, it is his 
belief (in every race and nation, alike the most ig- 
norant and the most cultivated upon the globe) that 
the mwn still lives on. 

Most characteristic of all, there is in human na- 
ture a moral order more beautiful than any thing 
that art can show, more imperative in its inexora- 
ble ness than any law of Nature — the order of duty. 
It is the high prerogative of man to perceive distinc- 
tions of right and wrong, unseen by any creature 
except himself, unseen by him through any organ 
of sense, revealed only to that marvelous inner eye 
— conscience. The right thtis seen he feels bound 
to obey, though he has to go through fire and tor- 
ture to do it. The wrong must be shunned, though 
the very heart-strings be torn asunder thereby. 
This moral law, as a French writer has well ex- 
pressed it, " though it accord not with the selfish 



194 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

ends of interest, the order of desire, nor the fickle 
trifling of his passing passions, nevertheless appears 
to him as the ideal end, the very crown of life, and 
he summons Nature to work with him for its real- 
ization." 

Such are the phenomena which theology observes 
in Nature, without and within the circle of hu- 
manity. 

The next step in the scientific method, as has 
been already noticed, is that of comparison and 
classification. To group together in the mind the 
things which are alike, and to distinguish them from 
the things unlike them, is, as Herbert Spencer states 
it, "not only the beginning of civilization, but the 
first step in the genesis of science." 

Now, passing over all those minor classifications 
and those secondary causes which science studies so 
assiduously, minutely, and successfully, what ulti- 
mate classifications may be made and what first 
causes may be found by M T hich to interpret the uni- 
verse most fully and completely? This is just the 
question which theology has asked, and in its way 
answered. It has divided the universe into two 
great groups, each, within its own limits, containing 
the widest range of similar phenomena, and sepa- 
rated from each other by the broadest contrast of 
nature. One group contains all natural phenomena, 
such as weight, size, form, heat, color, motion; the 
other, all mental or spiritual phenomena, perception, 
reason, love, will, aspiration. 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 195 

In the one group, inertia is the law ; in the other, 
spontaneity. In the one, necessity ; in the other, 
freedom. In the one, the phenomena have a defi- 
nite relation to space — they have always a certain 
dimension, or local or extended movement; they 
can be weighed or measured. The phenomena of 
the other, on the contrary, exist in relation not to 
space, but to time ; they have not extension, but du- 
ration ; they cannot be either weighed or measured. 
The phenomena of the one are discerned by the 
senses; those of the other, by no sense, but only by 
consciousness itself. In the one group, every thing 
is divisible, even the smallest conceivable quantity 
is conceivably still further separable ; in the other 
group, the subject affirms its indivisibility and iden- 
tity. In the one group every thing belongs to the 
earthly "and the finite. In the other group there is 
a constant attraction and rise toward that which lies 
higher. 

These two great groups of phenomena having 
been thus clearly marked off from each other, re- 
ligion then makes its inductions. As science infers, 
in explanation of the different phenomena exhibited 
by liquids and gases, that there is a different molecu- 
lar structure as the respective substratum or sub- 
ject of each ; and in explanation of the diverse 
chemical properties of two chemical elements, such 
as potassium and oxygen, that there is a diverse 
atomic constitution as the subject of each ; and again 
for the luminous vibrations still another subject, 



196 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

called ether, different from the subject of pondera- 
ble things — so religion, in explanation of the dif- 
ferences of material and spiritual phenomena, infers, 
as the subjects of each, distinct underlying realities, 
which it calls, in the one case, "matter," in the 
other, " spirit." This " spirit," it is true, has never 
been seen by mortal eye, probably never will be 
seen by mortal eye, and is therefore known only by 
a mental inference. But the same is true of mole- 
cule, atom, and ether. As these invisible things are 
inferred by science from the visible phenomena 
which it observes according to the mental law, that 
phenomena or qualities must belong to something 
as a subject, and that when the qualities are radi- 
cally different the subjects must be supposed differ- 
ent, so is " spirit " the corresponding induction of 
religion from mental and moral phenomena. 

As the imagination will not, in Tynclall's ' lan- 
guage, "accept a vibrating multiple proportion, a 
numerical ratio in a state of oscillation," as the 
source of a train of ether-undulations, but "the 
scientific imagination, which is here authoritative, 
demands, as the origin and cause of a series of 
ether-waves, a particle of vibrating matter, quite 
as definite, though it may be excessively minute, 
as that which gives origin to a musical sound ; " 
so, conversely, the religious imagination, in the re- 
ligious realm equally authoritative, will not accept 
as the source of mental and moral states a vibrating 
1 "Fragments of Science," p. 135. 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 19? 

material particle, but demands, as the origin and 
cause of spiritual phenomena, a spiritual subject, 
quite as distinct from matter as its phenomena are 
distinct from material phenomena. 

If an independent spiritual entity be a correct 
induction from spiritual phenomena, it will readily 
be seen to follow that this spiritual entity or soul, 
not being a compound, but an indivisible unit, as it 
constantly affirms, will not be dissolved by the dis- 
solution of the body, but simply be released from its 
mortal coils. The same conclusion results also from 
the universal belief of mankind in a life after death. 
The philologists comparing the various languages of 
the Indo-European race — Sanscrit, Greek, Roman, 
Teutonic — find in them all certain common roots. 
They infer that these common roots must have been 
in use in the primitive Aryan race, before it left its 
ancient home in the table-lands of Asia and was dis- 
persed in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany. From 
these common roots they tell us the social, political, 
and domestic conditions of our primitive ancestors. 
Again, geologists, observing the various appearances 
and peculiar illustrations of extreme antiquity which 
the earth presents, assume that they are not artificial 
or simulated, as bigoted defenders of the Mosaic 
record have sometimes contended, but that the testi- 
mony of primitive Nature may be relied upon as 
truthful. By parity of reasoning, religion infers 
from the universality of the belief in life after death 
that it is at once a primitive deliverance of human 



198 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

nature, and as such ought to be accepted as vera- 
cious. 

The existence of the soul, now and hereafter — 
this is the first great induction of religion. Then 
follows the second, that of Deity. If we consider 
the work of the palaeontologist, philologist, geolo- 
gist, or mechanician, we shall find them always 
searching after the causes of things. What is the 
origin of plants and animals? how did languages 
begin? how did the earth come into existence and 
into its present condition ? — these are the questions 
vvhich are perseveringly studied by these physical 
investigators. The principle upon which they pro- 
ceed in their inquiries is, that all motion or change, 
of whatever kind, had some ulterior cause. "With 
none of them is the business of scientific inquiry 
closed with the first induction of a cause. Beyond 
the proximate cause, they say, there must be a more 
remote. No sooner is it found, for example, that 
the peculiar scratches on rocks and upon banks of 
characteristically -shaped stone, running across the 
mouth of certain valleys in Scotland, are caused by 
ancient glaciers, than the inquiry is made, "What is 
the cause of these glaciers % " If they are recognized 
as products of snow long and tightly pressed to- 
gether, then the snow must be traced to its cause in 
the action of extreme cold upon the moisture of the 
air ; and now a cause must be sought for this exces- 
sive cold which no longer exists in the same regions. 
If this again be plausibly referred to a change in the 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 199 

earth's orbit, its distance from the sun diminishing 
the amount of heat received by the earth, the in- 
vestigator does not cease his inquiries, but demands 
an explanation of this change of orbit. And when 
this is found in a secular change in the direction of 
the earth's axis, still traceable, the torch of inquiry 
is brought to bear upon the very origin of the plane- 
tary system. 

Thus the man of science is led farther and 
farther back, each secondary cause of the chain re- 
solving itself as soon as reached into an effect of 
something else. This chain may run on to more 
and more remoteness. It may reach greater and 
greater simplicity and power. Nevertheless, the 
mind cannot find any satisfactory resting-place at 
any point of it, nor can it be satisfied to pursue 
indefinitely this phenomenal series. It conceives 
necessarily a first cause, a commencement, not mere- 
ly for each part, but for the whole of the chain — an 
ultimate cause dependent upon nothing previous. 
It is the value of every true step made in philoso- 
phy, Newton said, that it brings us nearer to this 
first cause. " The business of natural philosophy" 
— these also are the words of the greatest of scien- 
tific authorities — " is to deduce causes from effects 
till we come to the very first cause, which certainly 
is not mechanical." 

Now, it is just this path and end that religion 
pursues. It is true that of late men of science have 
themselves held back from taking the last step, to 



200 PHYSICAL AND "RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

the Ultimate Source, as a thing beyond their proper 
province. But they ought not to object to religion's 
doing it in strict accordance with the method of sci- 
ence up to the point where the province of the latter 
was thought to cease. Some such ultimate source or 
first cause must be conceived. For the universe is 
not an eternal quiescence. It is in constant change, 
constant motion. And these changes and motions 
are part of a series actually existing and progressing. 
No matter what intermediate causes or agencies there 
may have been, the mind is not satisfied to stop with 
any of these, but passes farther and farther back, 
seeking the first cause, which must some time have 
first started the series. Now, this first cause cannot 
be matter itself ; for matter has no spontaneity of 
action. The essential idea of matter — an idea which 
is fundamental to all scientific dealing with it — is 
that matter is inert ; remains in its present condi- 
tion forever, unless disturbed by some external 
agency. If matter did not observe this law, no 
science of it would be possible. In whatever con- 
dition and position matter originally existed, in that 
it must always have remained. To start the evolu- 
tion of the universe, some external agency, possessed 
of spontaneity, must be inferred. As the only spon- 
taneous agent we know of is free-will, the will of 
some Supreme Being must be regarded as the great 
First Cause. 

A similar induction results from examining the 
nature of the proximate causes of change. A light- 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 201 

ning-flash, for example, was found by Franklin, 
in his famous experiment witli the kite, to be of 
the same nature as an electric discharge. The elec- 
tric discharge was attributed to the action of elec- 
tric fluid, but further investigation showed it to 
be a case of molecular motion. Heat, light, sound, 
have all likewise, in turn, been found to be modes 
of motion, capable of conversion one into the other. 
Going one step farther back, all motion is found 
to have its source in some force — gravitative, co- 
hesive, repulsive, chemical, or other kind. As 
Herbert Spencer says, " We come down finally 
to force as the ultimate." What, then, is this 
last universal cause, this wondrous force ? We do 
not actually observe force in the external world at 
all. When we observe a change in the external 
world, all that is really observed is the following of 
one event by another. We believe that there is 
force working this succession, because when the line 
strikes us we feel force, and especially because in 
acts of the will we are conscious that we exert force. 
" Undoubtedly," says Mr. Huxley, 1 " active force is 
inconceivable except as a state of consciousness, . . . 
except as something comparable to volition." Sir 
John Herschel similarly says, 2 " In the only case in 
which we are admitted to any personal knowledge 
of the origin of force, we find it connected, pos- 

1 Article entitled "Bishop Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sen- 
sation," Macmillari's Magazine, 1871. 

2 "Familiar Lectures," p. 461. 



202 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

sibly by intermediate links untraceable by our facul- 
ties, but yet indisputably connected with volition, 
and by inevitable consequence with motive, with 
intellect, and with all those attributes of mind in 
which — and not in the possession of arms, legs, 
brains, and viscera — personality consists." To these 
names I might add the names of Carpenter, Spen- 
cer, Grove, and Wallace, in science — not to speak 
of eminent authorities in philosophy, all of whom 
derive our knowledge of force from our volitional 
and mental experiences. As in the only case where 
we know force directly we find it to be an attribute 
of will and intelligence, an energy and expression 
of spirit, Ave must infer next, in accordance with the 
steps already taken, in accordance with the general 
rule of science, to interpret the unknown by the 
known, that force everywhere else is but an energy 
and expression of spirit — and of what other spirit 
can it be than of the One Infinite and Almighty 
Personality whom we call God '. 

Drawing another inductive line, religion reaches 
the same conclusion. From the wise adaptation of 
means to ends in vegetable and animal life, the 
physiologist and anatomist are accustomed to infer 
certain designs or purposes as their explanation, and 
they freely employ this idea of design to assist them 
in solving the problems of their departments. Dr. 
Paget, 1 speaking of the study of physiology, claims 
as one of its advantages that it " is a science of de- 

1 Youmans's " Culture demanded by Modern Life," p. 139. 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 203 

signs and final causes. ... In the inorganic world," 
he says, " we seem to come nearer to the efficient 
than to the final cause of events. But in the or- 
ganic world the reverse is true ; purpose, design, 
and mutual fitness, are manifest wherever we can 
discern the structure or the actions of a part ; utility 
and mutual dependence are implied in all the lan- 
guage and sought in all the studies of physiology. 
The efficient causes and the general laws of the vital 
actions may be hidden from the keenest search ; but 
their final causes are often nearly certain." 

In the history of physiology, Whewell has shown 
that those who studied the structure of animals were 
irresistibly led to the conviction that the parts of 
this structure have each its end or purpose ; that 
each member or organ not merely produces a cer- 
tain effect, or answers to a certain use, but is so 
framed as to impress us with the persuasion that 
it was constructed for that use. This persuasion 
directed the researches of Harvey. By the assidu- 
ous application of this principle, as he himself con- 
stantly declared, Cuvier was enabled to make the 
discoveries that have rendered his name so illus- 
trious ; and it has been dwelt upon as a favorite 
contemplation, and followed as the most certain of 
guides, by the best anatomists and biologists. More- 
over, from such cases of curious adaptation, science 
has not alone affirmed design, but also some De- 
signer. One of the most astonishing of modern dis- 
coveries is that of the extreme antiquity of man, 



204 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

antedating, probably, the date formerly assigned by 
tens of thousands of years. How is it that science 
has been able to establish this ? Simply by the dis- 
covery, in certain positions, of articles which it in- 
ferred were of human workmanship — bits of pot- 
tery under fifty feet of Nile-mud ; instruments of 
bone or stone under thirty or forty feet of peat ; 
flint axes, spear-heads, daggers, and knives, some- 
times rudely carved with the representation of an 
ibex-head, a reindeer, or a rhinoceros, found in the 
drift of the Tertiary period in connection with the 
bones of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, 
cave-bear, or woolly rhinoceros. And why was it 
judged that these articles were of human origin, 
rather than natural ? Only through the principle, 
either expressly stated or clearly implied, that in- 
struments, fashioned in accordance with a regular 
plan, and adapted to an intelligent purpose, could 
not be the result of chance, or of unintelligent 
force or unconscious principles of order, but must 
have had intelligent — that is, in this case, human — 
makers. 

In the same way — employing the same princi- 
ples of reasoning — religion argues, from the evi- 
dences of fitness and contrivance in the world, in- 
telligent design, and from the intelligent design an 
Intelligent Designer of supreme power and wisdom, 
equal to the supreme work manifested in the uni- 
verse of creation. The theological argument is of 
the same kind as the reasoning of the archaeologist, 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 205 

only vastly more cogent in proportion as the in- 
stances of adaptation from which the theologian 
starts are incalculably more numerous and curious 
than those of the physical inquirer. The proofs 
of design which the theist reasons from are not 
drawn- from a few scratches on a bone, or a hole 
drilled through a piece of obsidian, or a few sharp- 
ened bits of flint, now .and then found in a gravel- 
pit or a cave. They are present wherever we turn 
our eye : in the coincident mathematics of plant 
and planet ; in the untaught geometry of the bee- 
hive ; in the admirable correlation of lung and air, 
sound and hearing, light and sight ; in the mutual 
ministries of male and female, life and death, mat- 
ter and spirit. From the wayside seed, laden with 
future provision for the folded germ, to the clus- 
tered systems, swinging in noiseless motion and 
perfect poise through the ethereal spaces, all Na- 
ture testifies to the Arranging Mind that has mar- 
shaled the atomic armies according to well-ordered 
plan. 

It is true . that scientific men, of late, have ob- 
jected strongly to religion's employment of the 
teleological argument. They charge that it leaves 
the field of experience to launch into that of un- 
verifiable conjecture. If so, they but condemn their 
own practice in the field of anatomy, archaeology, 
and physiology. 

If no man of science will accept a poniard fash- 
ioned from a reindeer's horn, or the rude repre- 



206 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

sentation of the reindeer carved on its handle, as 
having come into existence by some chance com- 
bination of matter, or blind working of natural 
force, without the aid of designing mind, will he 
maintain, will any one maintain, that such chance 
combination of matter, or blind working of natural 
force, could bring into existence the breath/mg mam 
that carved it and the living reindeer thus depicted '. 
It is represented that, by showing how certain effects 
necessarily follow from certain antecedent conditions, 
all ground for supposing a prospective purpose is 
removed. " Because the iish," we are told, " has fins 
and gills, therefore, it uses them, and swims in the 
water. That is all. There is no need to suppose 
the tins and gills were made for that use." But 
how does the first truth militate against the last \ 
If a purpose is wisely carried out, the means em- 
ployed will always be such as lead naturally and 
necessarily to the end aimed at, To show that there 
is no design in the case, it ought to be shown, not 
that the structure of the fish naturally results in his 
swimming in the water, but that it is opposed to it. 
Nor do the theories of natural selection and evolu- 
tion, if we suppose them already established, give 
any such fatal blow to the teleologic.il argument as 
it is urged that they do. The inference of design 
is not to be removed by showing that the present 
form or adaptation is not the original one, but a 
development from some rude structure, a modifica- 
tion of some more primitive function, and that the 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 207 

line of proximate causes and evolving conditions 
can be traced back to a remote past and a very dif- 
ferent natural condition, even perhaps to some pri- 
meval nebula of glowing gas. All this but shifts 
the point of action and method of work of the de- 
signing intelligence, but does not dimmish or abolish 
the necessity of inferring it. On the contrary, it 
increases the measure of Creative Mind to be sup- 
posed. For in that glowing gas were cradled all 
the elements of the earth-to-be. The special adapta- 
tions that now have been evolved lay latent there, 
and were necessarily unfolded from the general or- 
der. But whence that general order — that orginal 
tuning of force to law, and matter to harmonious 
rhythm, and that exquisite adjustment of the whole 
vast net-work of kosmic tendencies, so that Nature 
should build itself up in beauty, and the strong ever 
come forth from the weak, and the better proceed 
always from the good, in an undeviating progress, 
till the ascent is made from crystal and plant up to 
the reasoning man ? 

Here is a greater need of intelligence than ever. 
Unless Nature be endowed with intelligence, there 
is no reason that we know why it might not have 
remained a perpetual chaos — a chronic anarchy of 
discordant elements, incapable of stable organization. 
Certainly the original arrangement and constitution 
of matter might have had any one of a million vari- 
ous positions and properties, and eaeh in the process 
of evolution would have given a different result. 



208 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

To choose out of the infinite variety of possible 
primitive arrangements, with their corresponding 
various results, just that one first arrangement and 
particular rudi mental structure that in gradual, ne- 
cessary unfolding would work out just the present 
admirable result, is a thing requiring fore-thinking 
wisdom far more than any instantaneous creation. 
"Natural evolution," says Prof. Owen, "by means 
of slow physical and organic operations, through 
long ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the 
act of an adaptive mind because we have abandoned 
the old error of supposing it to be the result of a 
primary, direct, and sudden act of creational con- 
struction." 

Even a Darwin, describing the wonderful con- 
trivances existing in some of the orchids, by which 
their fertilization by insect go-betweens is secured, 
is compelled in spite of himself to resort to the lan- 
guage of design to express the facts; and Moleschott, 
the chief of the German materialist school, in an in- 
troductory address delivered at Turin, while fore- 
warning the investigator against guessing at final 
causes, yet would not have it believed that he is 
" rash enough or blind enough to refuse to Nature a 
design and an end. All those whose ideas I share 
by no means deny the telos which they guess, which 
they even sometimes perceive in Nature." 

Again, from the spiritual wants of human nature, 
the inductive line leads to the same conclusion. One 
of the constant assumptions of scientific investiga- 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 209 

tors is that a constant harmony exists between the 
structure and the environment of any living thing. 
" Wherever there is a constitutional want," the sa- 
vant says, " there is a corresponding provision for 
meeting it." If he finds portions of the fossilized 
remains of a hitherto unknown animal, and by it 
recognizes its digestive apparatus as adapted to flesh 
food, then he knows that it must have had claws and 
jaws suitable for rending its prey ; if he finds its di- 
gestive organs ruminant, then he is assured that the 
animal had teeth for cropping grass, and that there 
was grass or other vegetation for it to crop. If he 
finds, as was found by the late Atlantic dredging 
expedition, animals at immense depths in the sea 
possessed of good eyes, he makes the induction that 
there is also there vegetable food for the animals to 
live on (though none was actually found), and light 
for the eyes to see by (though ordinary sunlight, ac- 
cording to his calculations, could not penetrate thest 
depths). If he is an evolutionist, like Herbert Spen- 
cer, whenever, in tracing down the line of descent 
he comes to a new species or a modification of an 
old one, there, he supposes, some new combination, 
of external conditions took place corresponding U 
the inward change. Even for life itself he can find 
no better definition than "the continuous adjust- 
ment of internal relations to external relations." 

By the same logical principle, religion draws, 
from our felt need of the Divine to realize our ideal 
aspirations, from our inability to remain satisfied, as 



210 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

other creatures are, with the fleshly and the earthly, 
the induction of a Being corresponding to these de- 
mands of human nature. The inward want, rooted 
in our deepest nature, of a Personal Object to whom 
to direct our love, our worship, and our instinctive 
prayers — a Heavenly Model to serve as the guide 
and inspiration of our perfecting, an ever-present 
Friend whom we may seek in all sorrow and trouble 
— this inward want implies, somewhere outside of 
us, the Infinite Power and Absolute Perfection 
which alone maintains human nature in that har- 
monious adjustment with its environment which is 
found everywhere else in the world. 

Once more, when the scientific explorer, unearth- 
ing the antiquities of Egypt or Assyria, discovers 
some tablet inscribed with laws, he not only infers 
that some one carved the sentences upon the stone, 
but also that they came from the mind and heart of 
some one — king, minister, or counselor. And, if the 
law be wise and just, its author is believed to have 
been wise and just. If, by further researches, other 
acts of this king or minister are discovered, and they 
are uniformly found to be such as would promote 
the happiness of the people, and would carry the na- 
tion constantly forward to higher and higher stages 
of physical, intellectual, and moral improvement, 
the historian does not hesitate to assign to him the 
attribute of benevolence. 

Similarly, religion proceeds from the observation 
of the moral law to the induction of a moral Law- 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS. 211 

giver. The profound sense of personal obligation 
to do the right and avoid the wrong, testifies, the 
theologian claims, to a Holy Ruler. Unless these 
most imperative convictions, these highest distinc- 
tions of human nature, are idle dreams, they must 
be the edicts of a righteous Governor. And the 
profuse beauty, the constant progress exhibited in 
this Ruler's works, especially the abundant means 
of happiness provided for all creatures, compel us to 
recognize goodness and love as among his most dis- 
tinguishing qualities. 

Finally, religion takes the last step of the scien- 
tific method by applying to these great inductions 
the test of verification. 

To the hesitating novice and the flaw-picking 
doubter, Religion's common injunction is, " Just try 
my teachings, and see for yourself if they do not 
authenticate themselves." And, whenever the trial 
is fairly made, the further harmony between the in- 
ductions of religion and the experience of human 
life is triumphantly shown. 

One of the most conclusive tests of science is 
that of concomitant variations. John Stuart Mill, 
in his system of logic, makes it the fifth canon of 
induction. "When Faraday showed that, by making 
or breaking or reversing the current of the electro- 
magnet, he had complete control over a ray of light, 
this was held to have proved the relation of cause 
and effect between magnetism and light. Let a 
man, then, make the experiment of dealing with 



212 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

himself and his fellows on two opposite supposi- 
tions. Let him, for a first experiment, regard and 
treat men as soulless animals. How poor, how out 
of joint, then, are all the results he meets with! 
Why is it, if this view be true, that he cannot 
reach his loftiest and most delicate development 
on any such theory ? Why is it that men so fool- 
ishly sacrifice the most useful to the ideal — the 
most needed bodily comforts and the most brill- 
iant earthly advantages to a worthless spiritual 
improvement? Why is it that even life itself is 
sacrificed that this chimera of a soul may receive no 
stain? 

But if a man, on the contrary, will live as if 
he had a soul and as if his fellow-men likewise had 
souls, each day will bring him confirmation of the 
great truth. In its light there are made plain to him 
the puzzles which before were so incomprehensible- — 
this mystic attraction toward the Infinite and the 
ideal, this discontent with our highest attainments, 
this remorse for the smallest transgressions, this 
strange fact in the realm of mind (the one exception 
in the animated kingdom), that even the most fully 
developed should not begin to reach a typical perfec- 
tion. He comprehends now why it is that all human 
glory and happiness and possession are so transitory, 
and yet how the human heart with immortal fidel- 
ity and hope can tell the grave that it claims in vain 
aught beyond the mouldering robe of him whom it 
loved. 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 213 

The continued growth of thought and affection, 
even until the very last, though the body long ago 
passed its meridian and commenced its decline ; the 
curious powers of the mind, seemingly independent 
of the senses, such as are exhibited in somnambu- 
lism, trance, clairvoyance, and similar phenomena ; 
the utter inability of the subtlest science to find any 
adequate material or physical explanation of con- 
sciousness and the conscious powers — each affords 
renewed verification to the religious postulate, "Man 
is the possessor of a spirit." 

So, too, when a man lives as if there were no 
God, he experiences the confutation of his atheism 
in his daily stumbles over the divine laws. But 
when a man honestly makes the experiment of act- 
ing steadily as if in the presence of a heavenly 
Father, he finds corroborative witnesses in every 
day's events. In whatever place he bows in sincere 
worship to this Adorable Being, he finds it good to 
be there. As often as in sincere prayer he seeks, 
from above, light in the perplexities of duty, or help 
in the hard battle of life, he receives the blessed an- 
swer — a heavenly beam upon his way, a God-given 
strength in the dusty conflict. Whenever, at bit- 
ter cost to his own desires and pleasures, he has 
yet obeyed the higher law of the Holy One, he has 
heard in his heart the approving whisper of a Divine 
voice. Whatever may be urged against the power 
of prayer to modify external Nature, the spiritual 
inward efficiency, the blessed reality of Divine com- 



214 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

muuion, is known by the direct experience of mill- 
ions. 

In the fortunes of kings and private citizens, in 
the rise and fall of states, in the fluctuations of races 
and the vicissitudes of society, in every case of con- 
duct, there is shown, to use Matthew Arnold's favor- 
ite phrase, "an Enduring Power, not ourselves, 
which makes for righteousness." Reward and retri- 
bution this Power allots in strict conformity to obe- 
dience or disobedience of the Divine Command- 
ment. Every student of history knows how strange 
oftentimes are these vindications of God's moral 
law. How curiously innocence is justified, evil un- 
earthed ! The engineer of vice hoist with his own 
petard, Haman hanged on his own gallows ! How 
sublime are the verifications of an Almighty Friend 
which the records of the past, the fresh life of the 
present, afford ! Witness the strength which the 
weakest, trusting in him, have drawn to bear super- 
human burdens ; the bursting of the rockiest heart, 
under the heavenly touch, into sweet blossoms of 
tenderness and charity ! Behold the sereneness with 
which pain and anguish can be borne, the bright 
faith with which the mourner can stand by the fresh- 
filled grave, the courage with which the champion 
of the right faces poverty, odium, perpetual annoy- 
ance, nay, goes to the stake or the gallows, assured 
of his vindication, hereafter on earth and at once 
above. Whatever contradictions, anomalies, enig- 
mas, the infiuitely-varied phenomena of life can 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 215 

present to religion, the sacred (Edipus, by one or the 
other of her two great truths, the existence of the 
soul and the existence of God, can always present a 
solution. 

What Whewell calls the consilience of induc- 
tions — the leaping together of numerous facts of 
different kinds from unconnected quarters to one 
point, every new discovery or hitherto troublesome 
exception taking at once a position in harmony — is 
here wonderfully exemplified. It is a characteristic 
of the theistic argument. In the exposition which 
we gave of the theistic induction, it will be remem- 
bered how line after line of inference converged to 
the same point ; and here, in the process of verifica- 
tion, we see the same thing afresh. 

" Now," as Whewell says, 1 " that rules springing 
from remote and unconnected quarters should thus 
leap to the same point, can only arise from that 
being the point where truth resides. Accordingly, 
the cases in which inductions from classes of facts 
altogether different have thus jumped together be- 
long only to the best-established theories which the 
history of science contains." For examples in 
which it has been especially exemplified, Whewell 
refers to the "Theory of Universal Gravitation" 
and the "Undulatory Theory of Light," and says 
that the Consilience of Inductions in them is con- 
sidered as establishing them beyond all doubt. " ISTo 
example can be pointed out in the whole history of 

1 "Novum Organum Renovatum," p. 88. 



gl6 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

science, so far as I am aware," adds "Whewell, " in 
which this Consilience of Inductions has given testi- 
mony in favor of an hypothesis afterward discov* 
ered to be false." 

Stronger verification, then, than this would 
hardly seem to be desired of religion by any one. 
Yet, if it is demanded, it has a further confirma- 
tion — that of prediction. "There is no more con- 
vincing proof," says Prof. Jevons, " of the soundness 
of scientific knowledge than that it thus confers 
the gift of foresight." " Prevision," says Auguste 
Comte, " is the test of true theory." The astrono- 
mer's predictions of the movements of the planets, 
the occurrence of eclipses, the return of comets — 
even, as in Leverrier's discovery of Neptune, the 
existence and movement of a hitherto unknown 
body — afford the most conspicuous proof of the cor- 
rectness of the Copernican system and the New- 
tonian laws. Even so have the prophets of old and 
the seers of God, in all time, through their compre- 
hension of the great laws of moral gravitation, been 
able to foretell the course of states and the coining 
eclipses of individual and national glory. They 
have reckoned beforehand, according to the calculus 
of Divine Sovereignty, the setting of unholy stars, 
now proudly flaming in the zenith, and the trium- 
phant rise of unsullied orbs, veiled then, though they 
were, in darkness — and, lo ! it has come to pass 
even as they have said. If all supernatural instruc- 
tion or illumination be denied to the prophetic voices 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 21 7 

of ancient and modern times, then the amazing 
power of insight, which must be ascribed to normal 
spiritual vision, as developed by religion, testifies 
with equal significance to the truth of the great 
principles on which religion is based. 

Thus has religion positive foundations of the 
same kind as science, and they may be built up in a 
genuine scientific order. Doubtless a sharp scien- 
tific critic would find objections to such an inductive 
demonstration of religion. He would charge that 
these so-called inductions were not complete and 
exact, but imperfect — at best, only approximated 
perfection. He would say, " They are not simple 
colligations of facts, but they are theories built up 
and superimposed upon them. They are not cautious, 
exhaustive generalizations of coexistences ; but they 
are hypotheses to which you have boldly leaped. 
And the verification you appeal to, though in much 
seeming to be given, is also in much wanting." 

Now, these objections I should not altogether 
deny; but I should give to them this twofold an 
swer, which ought fairly, it seems to me,, to stop the 
mouth of the scientific objector, or of any objector 
who usually accepts, without hesitation, current sci- 
entific conclusions : First, in the previous chapters it 
has been shown in general that every one of these 
objections applies to science as well as to religion. 
Secondly, in the positive presentation, in the present 
chapter, not a single medium of proof is employed 
in regard to which it is not or cannot be shown 
10 



218 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

that the very same argument, or its counterpart, is 
customarily and confidently employed by science. 
If one is to be rejected, then Loth should he re- 
jected ; if one is to be trusted, then both should be 
trusted. 

To sum up, then, the argument of the last four 
chapters. Science, equally with religion, has a faith- 
basis. It uses intuition, authority, evidence, and 
probable inference, and is often destitute of possible 
verification. Science, no more than religion, can 
withhold nor does withhold its belief from the 
supersensual, the immaterial, or the inconceivable. 
Inexactness, uncertainty, and variation in the results 
of its labors, are faults found in science as well as 
in religion. On the other hand, religion, as well 
as science, has an experimental basis. It grounds 
itself on observation ; it proceeds by induction, and 
it confirms its truths by verifications and previsions. 

In this similarity of science and religion is there 
not something that should have practical influence 
with that daily-increasing number who, while ac- 
cepting implicitly all the established truths and even 
the wildest speculations of science, look upon reli- 
gion with suspicion, if not contempt ? We commend 
to all such the words of Huxley : " By science I 
understand all knowledge which rests upon evidence 
and reasoning of a like character to that which 
claims our assent to ordinary scientific propositions, 
and if any one is able to make good the assertion 
that his theology rests upon valid evidence and 



POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS, ETC. 219 

sound reasoning, then it appears to me that such 
theology must take its place as a part of science." 

I respectfully ask why the fundamental truths of 
religion do not already stand in that category with 
as good a right as the greater portion of what is 
called science ? 



220 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



CONCLUSION. 



A survey, then, of the relations of Physical and 
Keligious Knowledge will bring a candid inquirer, 
I believe, to these conclusions: There is no neces- 
sary and rightful antagonism between Science and 
Religion. The actual opposition existing is due to 
the fact that each is, in many things, ignorant of 
itself and ignorant of the other. A fuller mutual 
acquaintance will so disclose to each its respective 
field that former intrusions shall cease, and will so 
fix the identity of each that other enemies shall not, 
as hitherto, be mistaken for it. More thorough 
knowledge w T ill also show that the claims both have 
made to exclusive knowledge and supremacy cannot 
be sustained. Each has similar weaknesses; each 
has similar supports. Neither can overthrow the 
other with safety to itself. Each, in fact, needs the 
other, and should make of it an ally. 

Without Science to correct and guide it, Eeli- 
gion is constantly going astray. The countless ex- 
cesses and irrationalities of superstition, the varied 
corruptions of every faith, adoration of stick ap* 3 



CONCLUSION. 221 

stone, lizard or bull ; devil-worship, witchcraft, or- 
gies of Bacchus, devouring rites of Moloch, and 
unclean sacrifices to Yenus — all these illustrate the 
mournful aberrations into which devotion inevita- 
bly runs when divorced from understanding. Zeal, 
without knowledge, as surely curses the world as 
with knowledge it blesses it. Religion should en- 
courage and urge the study of science, rather than 
forbid it. The Church, instead of anathematizing 
the great interpreters of Nature, should canonize 
them. The truly devout behold God's footsteps 
everywhere ; and everywhere, in the depths of the 
earth as in the heights of the sky, in forms of 
matter as in the thoughts of men, should search for 
"the fullness of him that filleth all in all." 

The whole universe is the embodiment and man- 
ifestation of its Creator. Every ray that streams 
from every star, every leaf that hangs on every tree, 
each living structure, each moving creature, tells the 
attentive student something of the thoughts and 
character of the Divine Artist. Nature, then, to 
the religious man, is God's oldest Testament, his 
most direct Scripture. The ideas disclosed in it are 
God's thoughts ; Natural laws, Divine laws \ Natu- 
ral History, a chapter of Natural Theology. To 
every new investigation of the physicist, Religion 
should say God-speed ; to every new discovery of the 
savant, All-hail. The finding of a Codex Sinaiiicus 
should not rejoice the Church more than the dis- 
covery of a new law in Nature. 



222 PHYSICAL AXD RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

And Religion needs not only to accept the cor- 
rections and recognize the coadjutorship of Science 
in disclosing the ways of God, but it should engraft 
into itself, I believe, more of the scientific spirit. 
Instead of aiming to defend systems already escab- 
lished and to bolster up foregone conclusions, it 
should go simply with inquiring mind to the eternal 
facts. Casting aside all theological prepossessions 
and pride of opinion, it should interrogate carefully 
all the oracles of the world, without and within, and 
patiently await, and humbly receive their answers. 
Its only test of conclusions should be their truth 
or falsehood — not their supposed soundness or un- 
soundness, their iiatteringness or humblingness, their 
pleasure or their pain. It should never feign certi- 
tude when it possesses none. It should discriminate 
to itself, and own in its public teaching the differ- 
ence between what in its realm is known and what 
is but guessed at. It should employ more constantly 
the scientific methods, gleaning its evidence from as 
wide a field as possible; sifting it with care, retain- 
ing only what is fact, verifying each theory in some 
satisfactory way before accepting it as proved. 

Theology, as I have endeavored to show, is fully 
able to bear such a scientific ordeal. In its essentials, 
if not in other respects, it has all the elements of an 
inductive science. "It includes," as has truly been 
said, "a multitude of positive facts — facts of ob- 
servation and experience having a relationship with 
each other, and hence capable of classification and 



CONCLUSION. 223 

generalization, giving us positive knowledge up to a 
certain point, and beyond that it includes a domain 
of truth involved in the facts observed, and to be 
divined by laying under those observed facts gen- 
eral conceptions or hypotheses^ which, though larger 
than our experience, must yet be true to our expe- 
rience." Thus Religion is capable of being made a 
genuine Science, and it will never, I believe, main- 
tain the purity, attain the stability and accuracy, 
reach unto the depth and breadth of truth which is 
within the demands of its grand mission unto man- 
kind, until it thus weds Science to itself. 

And, similarly, Science needs the help and in- 
spiration of Religion to fulfill the true measure of its 
usefulness. Religion, without Science, is like writ- 
ing a history without facts ; Science, without Reli- 
gion, is a biography without a subject. Religion, 
without Science, is a pyramid without base ; Science, 
without Religion, is the pyramid without apex. 

ISTo one can earnestly study Nature without 
taking the first steps on the road of Faith. As 
he traces backward and forward the generations 
of the world, he makes the acquaintance of that 
which is no less than Eternal. As he meditates 
the course of outspreading matter and space, he 
recognizes that which is Infinite. As he tracks the 
restless energies of the Kosmos, he comes to know 
that which he cannot call less than Omnipotent. 
Through the multitudinous variety of the universe, 
he discerns the Unity on the axis of which all turns — 



224 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

the single centre from which all radiates. In the 
contemplation of this stupendous power, the man of 
science is absorbed. lie believes that all happiness 
depends upon the knowledge of it, and the conform- 
ing of men's lives to it. He recognizes himself as 
bound up with it, and is filled with inexpressible awe 
as, in his studies, he enters into its marvelous secrets. 
" It comes that," as Strauss says, " he demands for 
his Kosmos the same piety that the devout man of 
old demanded for his God." Thus Science imbues 
its devotees with the spirit of worship ; leads them, 
if not to the inner, nevertheless to the outer court of 
Religion. Only one more step is needed — that from 
the force to the Cause ; from the law to the Law- 
giver — to bring them into the temple of God. 

And this further step Science ought logically to 
take. The boast of Bacon that he had taken all 
knowledge as his province is the duty of Science 
To ignore the whole domain of spiritual truth is 
but half to perform its mission. 

Religion has its facts as well as Science ; the im- 
material thought, the self -directing will, the sense 
of right and wrong, the consciousness of moral re- 
sponsibility, these are facts as much as attraction of 
magnet or undulation of sound-wave. Sublime as- 
pirations, immortal longings which protoplasm can- 
not account for ; heroisms and self-sacrifices not to 
be explained on the principle of the greatest good 
of the greatest number; a current in human af- 
fairs that runs steadily toward the right, the true, 



CONCLUSION. 225 

and the good — these, also, are facts. A complete 
science ought to study these facts candidly, and 
draw from them their logical inductions — soul and 
God ; a complete science should take note, not 
only of the verifications of physical doctrines, in 
physical experience, but of these equally strong 
verifications in spiritual experience of spiritual 
truths. It should own the force not only of those 
native predispositions that assure us of Nature's 
constancy and Matter's indestructibility, but of those 
ineradicable convictions that asseverate the soul's 
immortality. It should recognize not only the 
questioning of the human mind for second causes, 
but its imperative demand for the First Cause. 
Does it become Science to exert itself so diligently 
merely to pass from effect to anterior effect, from 
one law to another law, only a little more simple, 
but never ask what is the prime power on which all 
depend — the Lawgiver behind all the laws ? Shall 
it trace with such painstaking assiduity every thread 
of the Kosmos, each hair-breadth of those exquisite 
webs of interacting laws, so harmoniously blended, 
so pervaded with the tokens of profoundest intelli- 
gence, and then, when we ask for the Weaver of this 
infinite marvel, the Reality behind this veil — tell 
us there is none — the veil is all f No ! The true 
man of science must work with that conviction un- 
der which Whewell says he wrote his " Philosophy 
of the Inductive Sciences," " that no philosophy of 
the universe can satisfy the minds of thoughtful 



226 PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

men which, does not deal with such questions as in- 
evitably force themselves upon our notice, respect- 
ing the Author and the object of the universe ; and 
also under the conviction that every philosophy of 
the universe which has any consistency must sug- 
gest answers, at least, conjectural, to such questions. 
No Kosmos is complete from which the question of 
Deity is excluded ; and all Kosmology has a side 
turned toward Theology." 

It is through the mastering and manifestation of 
this theological side, this Godward face, that Sci- 
ence delivers to mankind its noblest message. That 
which makes Science something more than the 
gratification of an idle curiosity or a low-lived utili- 
tarianism — that which gives to it in the thoughts of 
the higher-minded a sacred dignity — is the belief 
that by it we are daily making clearer and clearer 
the ways of that Infinite Power, the features of 
that Divine Image, which all things shadow forth. 

Soon may that happy day — happy for both alike 
— dawn upon the world, when Religion and Science, 
recognizing the common ground on which they 
stand, the similar methods, objects, and results which 
characterize each, the need they stand in of each 
other, the one God of whom they both prophesy, 
shall cordially join hands in his service ! 



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